Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Ātiawa
Patricia Grace is an influential New Zealand writer of novels, short stories and children’s books. Grace is known for writing impactful stories about everyday life and for her distinctly New Zealand voice. Her writing has resonated with Māori and Pākēha audiences and has been widely read by New Zealanders. Grace’s debut novel, Waiariki was the first novel published by a wāhine Māori writer.
Grace trained as a teacher and discovered writing when she was at university. She began publishing stories in her 20’s while balancing her teaching career. Since then, she has become a widely published and decorated writer known for her novels and short stories. Grace has published six novels, seven short story collections and fifteen children’s books. Her work has been translated into eleven languages.
Grace was the founding chair of the Te Hā committee. Grace was incredibly active on the committee, she played an instrumental role in the establishment of On the Bus, a roving tour of Māori writers. Grace also tutored in a series of writing wānanga for Te Hā, with a focus on fiction and children’s writing.
Her writing has won national and international acclaim, and her books are highly decorated. Waiariki, her first novel won the Herbert Church Prose Award for first book in 1976. The Kuia and the Spider written by Grace and illustrated by Robyn Kahukiwa won the Children’s Picture Book of the Year in 1982. Grace won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for Potiki in 1987. Dogside Story, another of her novels was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize in 2001. Her next novel, Tu won First Prize for Fiction and the Deutz Medal for fiction or Poetry at the New Zealand Book Awards in 2005. Her novel, Chappy was a finalist in the Ockhams in 2016.
In 2021 her novel Cousins was adapted into a film. The adaptation was initiated by master filmmaker Merata Mita and brought to completion by co-directors Briar Grace-Smith and Ainsley Gardiner.
She has received a number of accolades for her services to the arts. In 1998 she was awarded a Queens Birthday honors. She holds two honorary doctorates in literature, one from Victoria University (1989) and one from the World Indigenous Nations University (2016). In 2005 Grace received an Icon Art Award in recognition of her literary achievements from the New Zealand Foundation of Arts. She was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2006 and was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007. In the same year she received the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
The notes that follow are taken from Patricia Grace and Paul Diamond in conversation at Pātaka Education Space, April 6, 2019.
Tuia te Kōrero—Origins of Te Hā
The origins of Te Hā go back to the late 80s/early 90s and possibly grew out of Ngā Puna Waihanga, a national body for Māori artists and writers set up in 1973. Tungia Baker came up with the name Te Hā. The aims were to identify, encourage and promote new writing by Māori. ‘Te Hā is the perfect name. It refers to the breath, to the very essence of who we are. You draw in, you give out. Simple, really.’
Te Hā originally kicked off in response to a lack of funding. Early conversations in those days were about the obstacles to accessing funding, but things quickly moved towards the aims of identifying, encouraging and promoting new writing by Maori. Patricia acknowledged some she called ‘real trailblazers,’ including Rowley Habib, JC Sturm, Arapera Blank and Meihana Durie, who was writing short stories then.
Te Hā ran many initiatives, including:
The creation of a bibliography of ‘everything that had ever been published by a Māori writer in English’. The original project extended to searching old newspapers for even a single poem that may have been published by a Māori writer. This project went on to become a PhD project completed by Bridget Underhill through Canterbury, and that incredible resource including the work of over 1,600 writers.
The early Te Hā movement included writers writing in te reo, but this group eventually split off. As Patricia said, ‘it was a bit hard to do both’. The new splinter group was chaired by Hirini Moko Mead.
Te Ao Hou, the Māori Affairs Journal, was not part of Te Hā, but was another significant resource at the time providing a publishing pathway for writers. A big driver behind Te Hā was the desire to break down stereotypes.
In Patricia’s words:
‘At that time you could count the number of Māori writers on one hand, and the trouble with stereotypes is that when there are not enough people who are Māori and who are writing there aren’t enough reflections out there of who we are. (And that starts to have the opposite effect – people think what you’ve written IS the stereotype) We are as diverse as any people are. But that wasn’t how we were seen.’
‘You write what you know, but there needs to be enough of you to show the landscape.’
‘None of us started out as Māori writers. Other people put the label on you. I was fine with it, it didn’t stop me doing what I wanted to do. Not everyone likes that label.’
‘The written word has been something I have always loved, from the minute I jumped out of my mother!’
The crucial question of ‘who is a Māori writer’ had always been there. People like Witi and Keri Hulme were always being questioned about their background. Witi’s response to the flack from the public was to stop writing for some time. And then he began to publish anthologies. What he was saying with these anthologies – full of diverse stories (here Patricia held up a copy of Into The World of Light – was that whakapapa alone is sufficient to identify you as a Māori writer.
‘And this was great, because we began to see the spectrum of writers, ranging from Arapera (raised in te reo and te ao Māori) to Bub Bridger, who only discovered she had Māori whakapapa when she was in her thirties. Witi’s anthologies captured the variousness of who we are.’
In fact, Patricia went on to suggest that the fact of having an identity that was ‘in question’, complicated or confused, was probably one of the defining factors of Māori writing and being Māori. ‘Other people put labels on you… I didn’t set out to be a Māori writer.’
Novels
Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978)
Potiki (1986)
Cousins (1992)
Baby No-eyes (1998)
Dogside Story (2001)
Tu (2004)
Ned and Katrina (2009)
Chappy (2015)
Short Story Collections
Waiariki (1975)
The Dream Sleepers (1980)
Electric City and Other Stories (1987)
Selected Stories (1991)
The Sky People (1994)
Small Holes in the Silence (2014)
Bird Child and Other Stories (2024)
Children’s books
The Kuia and the Spider/ Te kui me te Pungawerewere (1981)
Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street/ Te Tuna Watakirihi me Nga Tamariki o Te Tiriti o Toa (1984).
The Geranium (1993)
Areta & the Kahawai/ Ko Areta me Nga Kahawai (1994)
Maraea and the Albatrosses/ Ko Maraea me Nga Toroa (2008)
Sources
“Patricia Grace.” Kōmako: a Bibliography of Writing by Māori in English. Ed. Bridget Underhill. 22 Oct. 2017, www.komako.org.nz/person/236.
Correspondence with Patricia Grace. January 2025.
Written by Aroha Witinitara (Ngāti Kahungungu ki Wairarapa) February 2025