Ian Reilly is an Australian author, artist, innovator and entrepreneur whose life has spanned classrooms and boardrooms, from the Silicon Valley to remote Pacific villages.

In 1990 Ian and his wife Heather left the comfort of suburban Australia to teach in Samoa, where they were immediately struck by a devastating cyclone.  Emerging without power, water and running out of food, they stepped into disorienting cultural collision, ethical dilemmas, and physical hardship.  Immersing themselves into a radically different culture not only challenged their assumptions about poverty, power, privilege, justice and western values, but also taught them valuable life lessons.

Encounter – A Journey into Chaos, Culture and Compassion is his powerful true story of cultural collision and personal transformation — a book for anyone hungry for a gripping story, for meaning and purpose, authentic experience, or those who have crossed borders to feel lost, overwhelmed and out of place.

Blending the reflective honesty of memoir with the pace and tension of a thriller, Ian’s prose is vivid, immersive and emotionally unflinching. He writes from inside the chaos of real life – inviting us to walk with him through the misunderstandings, moral dilemmas, fear, comedy, tragedy and deep beauty of Polynesian village life and culture. Readers often say of Encounter  they “can’t put it down” because the story refuses to let them stay comfortable.

That early experience of cross-cultural work helped shape Ian’s later career as an award winning, international innovation consultant designing world first, breakthrough products for companies in Europe, the United States and Japan. He later went on to found Agersens, the agri-tech startup that pioneered the development of the world’s first virtual fence technology for cattle.

After sale of Agersens to a New Zealand corporation in 2021, Ian returned to his lifelong passion for storytelling, poetry and visual art, painting in oil, watercolour and pastel.