Diana Wichtel is a revered name in New Zealand letters. She is the author of Driving to Treblinka (Awa Press), which won the Royal Society Te Aparangi Award for General Non-fiction at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Born in 1950 in Vancouver, Wichtel's mother, Patricia, was a New Zealander; her father, Benjamin Wichtel, a Polish Jew who escaped from the Nazi train taking his family to the Treblinka extermination camp in World War II. When she was 13 her mother brought her to New Zealand to live, along with her two siblings. They never saw her father again. Wichtel was appointed staff writer at the New Zealand Listener in 1984 and has won many awards for her television criticism, profiles and feature writing. She was still writing for the Listener when its then publisher announced the magazine's closure in April 2020. The New Zealand Herald's weekend magazine Canvas welcomed Wichtel as a fortnightly columnist in October 2020.