Whiti Hereaka with Louise Wright - Opening Event

Our festival begins with a very special guest who is one of the most powerful, audacious and distinctively Māori voices in Aotearoa writing.

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 2020 Queenstown Writers Festival guest Witi Ihimaera, of an anthology of Māori myths, Pūrākau.

While she was writer in residence at Randell Cottage Whiti wrote her first novel, The Graphologist's Apprentice, which was shortlisted for Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers Prize SE Asia and Pacific 2011. Since then she has held two residencies at the Michael King Writers Centre, was a writer in residence at the University of Iowa, and published the YA book Bugs and the timeslip novel Legacy in between writing plays and scripts and teaching at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University.

Whiti's 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. We're delighted she will join us to talk about this game-changing book and her multifaceted career.

Ticket price includes nibbles and a drink.

Supported by Two Paddocks.