Claire Ahuriri-Dunning was born in Takapuna, Auckland in 1989, and comes from a very mixed background of Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Scots, German Jews and Irish Catholics. She discovered her love for playwriting under the tutelage of Kathryn Whillans at Glenfield College, and continued pursuing writing through a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Auckland. She has had a varied career so far as a café dishwasher, private house cleaner, school administrator, and high school teacher, before finally settling into the exciting world of software testing as a day job.

Her creative endeavours of note include one published play, Spilt Milk, and one published board game, Cat Capers. Spilt Milk won Auckland Flip the Script 2005 and received a Special Mention from Playmarket's Plays for the Young competition 2010. Her Brechtian pantomime Dracula was shortlisted in the Adam NZ Play Awards 2018. Besides writing, she is an actor, director, and general dogsbody around the theatre. She received the ACTT Best Props Award in 2016 for her play King Arthur, which featured giant's legs puppets, a sparkly pink dragon, and a 3-metre-long 8-kilogram stuffed toy. More recently, she has branched out into writing and developing narrative video games, including The Nine Lives of Nim: Fortune's Fool, Her Jentle Hi-ness, and Wonderland Nights: White Rabbit's Diary which won the Poetic Serving: Excellence in Narrative Pav award at the NZ Game Awards 2021.

Her current avenue of creativity is trying to craft the fantasy novel series she has been dreaming of and drafting for the last fifteen years. She has been awarded an NZSA 2024 Mentorship with mentor Cassie Hart, and is a participant in Te Papa Tupu 2024, working on the first volume of that same series, Corangelus.

Claire spends her nights and weekends deep in either the roleplaying, gaming or local theatre scenes. She lives in Auckland with her husband James, their children, cat Nimue and rabbit Rudigar.

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