Worth the mahi

Maori writers are riding a wave of international demand for stories from indigenous people, and it’s encouraging a shift in attitude from the authors themselves.

- SALLY BLUNDELL

The Facebook subtitles are rickety but the enthusiasm is unequivocal. It’s a novel that slammed like the waves of the Pacific Ocean,” says the reviewer from La Curieuse Librairie Troquet, a tiny bookshop in southwest France. She holds up her copy of Bones Bay, the French edition of Becky Manawatu’s Aué. What this book offers is] its myths, the magical realism of this culture and discover another New Zealand away from clichés, Maori tattoos, surfing or rugby.’

Like those far-reaching Pacific waves, Manawatu’s debut novel has travelled the world. Since winning the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards’ Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and first book of fiction award in 2020, it has been published in France, Argentina, Uruguay, Bulgaria, Turkey and, through Scribe Publications, the UK and US Scribe will also publish Manawatu’s follow-up novel, Kataraina, due out later this year). Aue was lauded in the New York Times as astriking tapestry of fierce love and unflinching violence’; it was held by a smiling Carrie Bradshaw in the Sex and the City spin-off, And Just Like That.

“That was so cool,” says Makaro Press publisher Mary McCallum. We were so stoked by that.”

Publishers and writers around the country are stoked as books, particularly fiction and poetry, by Maori and Pasifika writers are finding their way on to bookshelves and review pages across the globe.

This year, Maori-owned independent publisher Huia Publishers was named Children’s Publisher of the Year for Oceania at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Hutchinson Heinemann in the UK and Avid Reader Press in the US published Rebecca K Reilly’s debut novel Greta Valdin, now shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize; Simon Schuster published its second crime novel by Michael Bennett, Return to Blood; Hachette UK released 17 Years Later, the new book by JP Pomare.