Stuart Hoar is am award-winning playwright, radio dramatist, novelist and librettist. His first stage play was Squatter in 1987. In 1988 he was awarded the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award before going on to have several prestigious fellowships – Playwright in Residence at the Mercury Theatre (1988-1989), Literary Fellow at Auckland University in 1990 and Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1993.

His screenplay for the short film Lovelock, won the New Zealand Writers’ Guild Best Screenplay Award in 1993.

He has had over 30 radio plays produced (and was Mobil Award Finalist in 1990 and 1994, and Mobil Award winner in 1995). His radio play Attitude was Radio New Zealand’s World Play for 2007 and Best Radio Play 2007 and broadcast by the BBC World Service in UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia.

He has written several opera libretti. The libretto for the opera Bitter Calm was a finalist in the Pater World Media Award's Music and Literary Division in 1990. A full-length production of Bitter Calm was subsequently performed as part of the International Festival of Arts, Wellington, 1994. A television version of this production was broadcast by TV3 in the same year.

In 1998 while living in Cambridge, England, Stuart’s first novel The Hard Light was published by Penguin NZ. He returned from England in 2000 to be Writer in Residence at Canterbury University and he was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow for 2007. His play Pasifika won the Adam New Zealand Play Award 2010. Stuart is currently based in Auckland.