Peter Northe Wells, Writer, filmmaker, historian, passed away peacefully on Monday 18 February 2019 at Mercy Hospice, St Mary's Bay, Auckland, aged 69.

From his obituary, Peter was born in 1950.He grew up in Point Chevalier, a peninsula of middle-class life surrounded by the waters of Auckland Harbour. Its mown, sun-bleached household lawns edged by a shady pohutukawa-fringed beach became a constant locale in both his fiction and memoirs.

Peter went to Pasadena Intermediate and to Mt Albert Grammar. He studied at Auckland University and at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. One of his research projects was the 1876 Boulton and Park Affair, where two vivacious Victorian cross-dressers were brought to trial. The subject would eventually become the basis of his 2003 novel, Iridescence.

Wells returned to New Zealand, entering the nascent film and TV industry, while writing short stories.

His first novel, Boy Overboard, evoked his childhood in Point Chevalier in all its vivid confusion. With Rex Pilgrim, he edited the controversial anthology Best Mates: Gay Writing in Aotearoa New Zealand. He returned to autobiography in Long Loop Home: a memoir and won the Montana NZ prize for biography.

Peter also founded (with Stephanie Johnson) the Auckland Writer's Festival. It would be followed by Samesame But Different, a festival of New Zealand LGBTQI+ literature.

He also wrote his noted "Napier Trilogy".

The Hungry Heart in 2012 revealed the various lives of the missionary William Colenso. From a polymath clergyman and printer of the first books published in New Zealand to the land speculator and recluse in Napier, Wells charted this formative New Zealand life in all its contradictions.

It was followed by Journey to a Hanging, which focused on the horrific death of the Reverend Carl Sylvius Völkner in 1865.  He was hanged, decapitated, his eyes eaten and his blood drunk from his church chalice. Kereopa Te Rau was sentenced to death for the crime. It was a book that would go to the heart of New Zealand race relations, both in the past and the present.

Dear Oliver: Uncovering a Pākehā History would complete the trilogy. Wells took his own family as his subject, following it back in time through increasingly fragmentary glimpses.

Then came his prostate cancer diagnosis and his last book, Hello Darkness. Told largely through his Facebook posts and the writer's own photographs, it broke new ground – a fresh style for a technological era.