Pauline Vaeluaga Smith is an author and an educationalist of Samoan, Tuvaluan, Scottish and Irish heritage. She trained as a teacher in Dunedin, later gaining a B.Ed. and lecturing at the University of Otago. ​ Currently, Pauline is the director of the Murihiku Māori and Pasifika Cultural Trust, based in Invercargill.

Her first book My New Zealand Story: Dawn Raid, published in 2018, was a finalist at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in the Esther Glen Junior Fiction category, and won the Best First Book prize.

Pauline was the keynote speaker at the Southland, Dan Davin Literary Foundation awards ceremony in 2018, and presented at Dunedin’s Ignition Children’s Writing Festival in 2019.