A life lived across cultures and continents.

A memoir about the stories women inherit—and the lives they choose next.

Kirstyn Lewis is a New Zealand-born Australian writer whose life and work have crossed five continents, numerous industries and profoundly different worlds.

Before turning to writing, she spent two decades working across New Zealand, Australia and the Middle East in television and entertainment, global events, cultural strategy, luxury property and international travel. Her career placed her inside worlds shaped by influence, ambition and institutional power—experiences that would later inform her writing.

Kirstyn has travelled to 80 countries, competed as an FEI endurance athlete and volunteered with displaced mothers and children during the Ukrainian refugee crisis. She holds a postgraduate qualification in Global Hospitality Management from Les Roches in Switzerland.

At sixty, she independently funded, published and narrated her debut memoir, The Past Still Breathes, producing it internationally across paperback, ebook and audiobook formats.

Opening in New York with a psychiatric crisis and admission to Bellevue Hospital, The Past Still Breathes explores adoption, bipolar disorder, coercive control, identity, belonging and female reinvention. It asks what happens when the identity that helped a woman survive no longer allows her to live truthfully.

Kirstyn writes and speaks about the stories women inherit, the labels placed upon them and the courage required to choose who they become next.

She is a member of the New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa (PEN NZ Inc) and the Australian Society of Authors.

Who might you become if you stopped living the story you inherited?