Our ninth resident for the year, Sinead (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou) is a kairangahau and writer who lives in Wellington. Her work has been published with Starling, Sport, Turbine Kapohau, The Pantograph Punch, RNZ and in the recent anthology Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. She is a member of Rangatahi o te Pene, a group of Māori writers who in 2019 published Te Rito o te Harakeke – A Collection of Writing for Ihumātao. She is also a co-editor of the online journal Stasi.
Sinead is working on a collection of poetry which involves many elements, she says ‘It is, in many ways, about my whakapapa, and my relationship with my bicultural heritage. This has involved historical research about key ancestors, both Māori and Pākehā, who had a significant role in shaping this country’s history. This collection is an exercise in imagining myself into my ancestors’ worlds, to understand and empathise with them, and to envision what kinds of people they were, and what I have inherited from them. Running through the collection will be poems about rivers of significance. Not only will these locate the story geographically, but they will also provide an opportunity to introduce some magical realism into the collection’.