Celebrating Te Wiki o te Reo Māori

We’re coming towards the end of Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, the annual celebration of Māori language. This year is particularly special as it marks 50 years since the Māori Language Petition, calling for the active recognition and teaching of te reo Māori in schools, was presented to Parliament by 22-year-old Hana Te Hemara.

The revival of te reo over the last half century has brought with it a flourishing of Māori literature.

In 1972, the same year the petition was presented to Parliament, Witi Ihimaera became the first Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, Pounamu, Pounamu, and the following year he became the first to publish a novel, with Tangi. He has gone on to become a hugely influential literary figure not only in Aotearoa but on the global stage – and in 2020 he enthralled the Queenstown Writers Festival audience with his musical, magical author talk.

Witi grew up in the small town of Waituhi, near Gisborne, and decided to become a writer as a teenager after becoming convinced that Māori were either ignored or mischaracterised in the literature of the times.

In his novels, plays, short stories and opera librettos he examines contemporary Māori culture, legends and history, and the impacts of colonisation in New Zealand. He has said that ‘Māori culture is the taonga, the treasure vault from which I source my inspiration’. His 1987 novel The Whale Rider is his best-known work, read widely by children and adults both in New Zealand and overseas.

This year Queenstown Writers Festival will welcome another two powerful voices in the landscape of creative writing in Aotearoa.

Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa) is a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of four award-winning novels and co-editor with Witi Ihimaera of an anthology of Māori myths retold by Māori writers, Pūrākau.

Whiti’s audacious fourth novel, Kurangaituku, which gives a face and form to the ‘monstrous’ bird-woman from the myth of Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Rebecca K Reilly (Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Wai) won the Hubert Church Prize for the best first book of fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her novel Greta and Valdin. It tells the story of siblings who share a Māori mother and a Russian father. The Ockham judges described the book as ‘gloriously queer, hilarious and relatable’.

We’re delighted that these two outstanding writers, each at very different stages in their careers, will join us at the Queenstown Writers Festival in November.

More to read