Fire of Heaven

Life and career

Russell Kirkpatrick was born in Christchurch in 1961 and remained there until relocating to Hamilton with his family in 1999. His fascination with maps and cartography began during primary school, and during the 1990s he was recognized for owning New Zealand's largest Lego collection. He completed a PhD in geography at the University of Canterbury in 1991, then taught at the University of Waikato in Hamilton from 2000 to 2014. Kirkpatrick contributed to several atlases, serving as deputy editor of the New Zealand Historical Atlas (1998), which won the readers' choice award at the 1998 Montana Book Awards, and authoring the Contemporary Atlas of New Zealand (1999), which had sold over 20,000 copies by 2009.

His 2000 work, Degrees of Deprivation in New Zealand: An Atlas of Socioeconomic Difference, was called an exciting tool by then-Health Minister Annette King for better-targeting health spending. He also wrote and photographed Walk to Waterfalls (2011), a book on New Zealand waterfalls, and has named Marokopa Falls as his personal favorite. Kirkpatrick's debut novel, Across the Face of the World, was published in Australia in 2004, becoming that year's best-selling fantasy novel there and topping the Dymocks bestseller list for over four weeks.

A 2004 New Zealand Herald review noted he spent 16 years writing it, an investment that paid off in world-building and a detailed atlas, though the reviewer found it lacking creative spark. Gerard Campbell of The Press called it a solid fantasy world worth exploring for genre fans. In 2008, the novel was released in the USA and became the year's best-selling science fiction or fantasy debut. It was followed by two more books in the Fire of Heaven series.