For the first
time, Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern
Letters (IIML) will offer a creative writing course for students to write from
or about Māori and Pasifika perspectives.
Titled Te
Hiringa A Tuhi, the course will be taught by award-winning novelist and
Victoria University creative writing graduate Dr Tina Makereti (Ngāti
Tūwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Pākehā, Moriori).
Dr Makereti says
she is looking forward to exploring this vibrant, but still underrepresented,
field with students. “We'll be engaging with the questions many of us encounter
when writing creatively and thinking about culture, and we'll be trying new
forms and figuring out how to simply produce good writing.”
The course is for
people interested in writing fiction, poetry or creative non-fiction informed
by Māori or Pasifika viewpoints, cultures and origins, the process of
colonisation, or questions of identity and belonging.
Professor Damien
Wilkins, Director of the IIML, is pleased that a writer of Dr Makereti’s
calibre will be leading the course. “Our hope is that Māori and Pasifika
writers who haven’t previously considered studying creative writing will
respond to this terrific opportunity.”
Dr Makereti’s first
book, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, won the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book
Awards Fiction Prize 2011. Her acclaimed debut novel is Where the Rēkohu
Bone Sings.
In 2009 she was
the recipient of the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative
Science Writing (non-fiction), and in the same year received the Pikihuia Award
for Best Short Story Written in English.
Dr Makereti was 2012 Writer in Residence
at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, and is currently the Creative New
Zealand Randell Cottage Writer in Residence.
Applications for
the trimester two course are now open. The course is limited to 12 places.
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