Rocky Wood, New Zealand-Australian author (b. 1959)
Rocky Wood (19 October 1959 – 1 December 2014) was a New Zealand-born Australian writer and researcher best known for his books about horror author Stephen King. He is the first author from outside North America or Europe to hold the position of President of the Horror Writers Association. Wood was born in Wellington, New Zealand and lived in Melbourne, Australia with his family. He has been a freelance writer for over 35 years. His writing career began at university, where he wrote a national newspaper column in New Zealand on extra-terrestrial life and UFO-related phenomena and published other articles about the phenomenon worldwide, in the course of which research he met such figures as Erich von Däniken and J. Allen Hynek; and had articles on the security industry published in the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and South Africa. In October 2010, Wood was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). He died of complications on 1 December 2014.