Whiti Hereaka facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Whiti Hereaka
Whiti Hereaka (2021)
Born	1978 (age 46–47) Taupō
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa
Citizenship	New Zealand

Whiti Hereaka (born 1978) is a talented writer from New Zealand. She writes plays for the stage, exciting novels, and scripts for movies. She is also a lawyer. Whiti has been a special writer-in-residence in different places and has spoken at book festivals around the world. Many of her books and plays have won awards or been chosen as finalists. In 2022, her book Kurangaituku won a major fiction prize. Her book Bugs also won an award in 2014 for children and young adults. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

About Whiti Hereaka

Whiti Hereaka was born in 1978 and grew up in Taupō, a town in New Zealand. She is from the Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Te Arawa Māori tribes, and also has Pākehā (New Zealand European) family.

As a child, she loved reading. Some of her favourite books included stories by Roald Dahl, the Narnia series, Anne of Green Gables, Tanglewood Tales, and The Moomins.

Her Education and Career

Whiti is a barrister and solicitor, which means she is a type of lawyer. She also has a special degree in creative writing, focusing on scriptwriting. She earned this from Victoria University of Wellington. In 2022, she started teaching creative writing at Massey University.

Whiti has written many plays for both the stage and for radio. She has also written several novels. She has been a "writer in residence" at different places. This means she gets a special place and time to focus only on her writing. Some of these places include Randell Cottage in Wellington and the Michael King Writers Centre. In 2013, she was even a writer in residence in Iowa City, USA.

She has been invited to speak at several book festivals. These include the Auckland Writers Festival in New Zealand, and festivals in Taiwan and Singapore. She also attended the WORD Christchurch Festival.

In 2012, Whiti was chosen for Te Papa Tupu. This is a special programme that helps Māori writers. Since then, she has helped other new writers in the same programme.

Her Book Legacy

One of Whiti's books, Legacy, was published in 2018. It is a "timeslip" novel. This means the story involves someone travelling through time. In Legacy, a Māori teenager goes back in time to World War I. He finds himself serving as his great-great-grandfather, Te Ariki, in the Māori Contingent.

Whiti Hereaka is also a trustee for the Māori Literature Trust. This group helps support Māori writers and their stories. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

Awards and Special Mentions

Whiti Hereaka's books and plays have won many awards. These awards show how talented she is as a writer.

Awards for Her Plays

Her play The Graphologist’s Apprentice was a finalist for the Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2011.

Whiti won the 2012 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award. This award celebrates new and exciting playwrights. She also won Best Play by a Māori Playwright at the Adam NZ Play Awards for her plays Te Kaupoi (in 2010) and Rona and Rabbit on the Moon (in 2011). People have described her plays as "poetic, poignant, and wildly imaginative."

Awards for Her Books

Her book Bugs was a finalist in the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. It also won an Honour Award. Bugs was named a Storylines Notable Book and was a finalist for the LIANZA Awards in 2014.

Her novel Legacy won the Young Adult Fiction award in the 2019 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. In 2021, she received the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship.

Whiti's book Kurangaituku won a very important award in 2022. It received the NZ$60,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. This book tells the famous Te Arawa Māori legend of Hatupatu. But it tells the story from the point of view of the bird-woman Kurangaituku. In 2023, Kurangaituku was also considered for the Dublin Literary Award.