We welcome our 12th resident for the year – Tina writes essays, novels and short fiction. Her latest novel is The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke and, alongside Witi Ihimaera, she is co-editor of Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing. During her residency Tina is working on a new novel.
In 2016 her story ‘Black Milk’ won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, Pacific region. Her first novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction, also won by her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa. In 2009 she was the recipient of the RSNZ Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing and the Pikihuia Award for Best Short Story in English.
Tina has presented her work all over New Zealand and in Frankfurt, Taipei, Jamaica and the UK. Tina teaches creative writing and Oceanic literatures at Massey University and has just completed a collection of personal essays, This Compulsion in Us.