Win a copy of Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories
To celebrate Te Wiki o te Reo Māori later this month (Māori Language Week 11-17 Hepetema) we're giving away five copies of the acclaimed new anthology of contemporary Māori short stories edited by Paula Morris.
Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whātua), director of the University of Auckland’s highly respected Master of Creative Writing Programme, has just added to the body of work available for lovers of local literature. She has edited an anthology Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories (Auckland University Press), which was published last month. The Hiwa refers to Hiwa-i-te-rangi, the ninth star of Matariki, signifying vigorous growth and dreams of the year ahead.
The idea is that Hiwa is about Māori writers, not about Māori subjects or imposing a mātauranga Māori lens on the whole project.
Four stories are written in te reo, and consulting editor Darryn Joseph (Ngāti Maniapoto) assisted with those, while the rest are written in English, including one by Paula. The anthology includes big names people are familiar with, such as Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace, but being well-known wasn’t the criterion for this book.
Some stories are new work and some have been published before, but in many instances appear in revised form partly, Paula admits, because of her “intrusive editorial bossiness”.
The editorial process included an open call for submissions in te reo or in English, as well as direct commissions. The open call drew around 120 stories by Māori writers in New Zealand or based overseas. “Some of the writers who submitted via the open call were known to me, like David Geary, who’s an accomplished dramatist and fiction writer based in Canada. But with many of the writers, I was reading their work for the first time. So that was exciting.”
Paula is all about giving budding writers opportunities, with up to 12 admitted to the Master of Creative Writing Programme every year. Some of them are included in Hiwa, including well-known flash-fiction author Jack Remiel Cottrell, Commonwealth Story Prize finalist Shelley Burne-Field, and recent graduate Pamela Morrow, now a PhD student at the University.
...both avid and new readers of Māori fiction, indeed anyone who appreciates a beautifully crafted short story, will find much to treasure in this collection.