Witi Ihimaera - WikiHQ

Witi Tame Ihimaera-Smiler (; born 7 February 1944) is a New Zealand author. Raised in the small town of Waituhi, he decided to become a writer as a teenager after being convinced that Māori people were ignored or mischaracterised in literature. He was the first Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, with Pounamu, Pounamu (1972), and the first to publish a novel, with Tangi (1973). After his early works, he took a ten-year break from writing, during which he focused on editing an anthology of Māori writing in English.

From the late 1980s onwards, Ihimaera wrote prolifically. In his novels, plays, short stories and opera librettos, he examines contemporary Māori culture, legends and history, and the impacts of colonisation in New Zealand. He has said that "Māori culture is the taonga, the treasure vault from which I source my inspiration". His 1987 novel The Whale Rider is his best-known work, read widely by children and adults both in New Zealand and overseas. It was adapted into the critically acclaimed 2002 film Whale Rider directed by Niki Caro. His semi-autobiographical novel Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1996) was about a married man coming to terms with his homosexuality. In later works he has dealt with historical events such as the campaign of non-violent resistance at Parihaka in the late nineteenth century.

Ihimaera is an influential figure in New Zealand literature, and over his long career has won numerous awards and fellowships, including multiple awards for both fiction and non-fiction at the New Zealand Book Awards spanning the period 1973 to 2016, the Robert Burns Fellowship (1975), the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1993), and a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement (2017). Until 2010 he was the Professor of English and Distinguished Creative Fellow in Māori Literature at the University of Auckland. He has since published two volumes of his memoirs: Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood (2014) and Native Son: The Writer's Memoir (2019).

Early life and education

Ihimaera was born in Gisborne, a city in the east of New Zealand's North Island and is of Māori descent. His iwi (tribe) is Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki. He has affiliations to Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou, and Whakatōhea. He also has Scottish ancestry through both parents. His family marae is Te Rongopai Marae in Waituhi, and he grew up in Waituhi—many of his stories are set in a fictional recreation of the town.

After high school, Ihimaera attended the University of Auckland for three years, from 1963 to 1966, but did not complete his degree, and returned to Gisborne where he became a cadet journalist for the Gisborne Herald. He subsequently became a postman, moved to Wellington and started studying part-time at Victoria University of Wellington, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1971. Ihimaera's first book, Pounamu Pounamu (1972), was a collection of short stories, which was awarded third prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards in 1973. Ihimaera has said it was rejected by three publishers before being accepted by the fourth. His first two novels were published in quick succession: Tangi (1973), which won first prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards in 1974, and Whanau (1974), which told the story of a day in the life of a Māori village.

Norman Kirk, then the prime minister of New Zealand, read Pounamu Pounamu and arranged for Ihimaera to be employed as a writer at the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1973. He subsequently worked as a diplomat with posts in Canberra, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

Return to writing: 1980s and 1990s

When Ihimaera began writing again, he wrote The Matriarch (1986) which examined the impacts of European colonisation on Māori, Not long after publication, it came to light that Ihimaera had used passages from the entry on Māori land in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand (1966), written by Keith Sorrenson, without acknowledgement. Ihimaera apologised to Sorrenson at the time. Mark Williams later noted that the consequences for Ihimaera were minor, and he became a professor in the year of the book's publication. He also wrote a libretto for an opera by Ross Harris, based on his second novel Whanau, and Dear Miss Mansfield (1989), a rewriting of Katherine Mansfield's short stories from a Māori perspective, in response to celebrations of 100 years since her birth. The collection was well-received overseas but criticised by New Zealand reviewers for a perceived lack of respect for Mansfield.

In a three-week period Ihimaera wrote his best-known work The Whale Rider (1987), the story of a young girl becoming a leader of her people. It won the Nielsen BookData New Zealand Booksellers' Choice Award in 2003.

In 1989, he left his job as a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the following year he became a lecturer in the English department at the University of Auckland. Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies was awarded the prize for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 1995. It was described in The Dominion Post as "a rollicking good yarn about Maori rural life in the 1950s", The novel was described by scholar Roger Robinson as featuring "conflict, growth and reconciliation, with subplots heroic, political and tragic". Robinson said it was "no small achievement to take this material off the grubby walls of public toilets, free it from sleaze, write it with vivid passion and through it affirm and celebrate a way of life of which most of us know almost nothing". In a review for The Dominion Post, Gavin McLean described it as Ihimaera's best book to date, and noted that much of the book's impact came from the intensity of the main character's relationship with his parents and his "desperate need to do better by his children"; "Unlike characters in many similar novels, coming out does not mean discarding all one's past." In an article in The Sunday Star Times, Ihimaera was quoted as saying the change "was quite a shock to me because I had always tried to hide, to say 'this is a book that could be about "everyman", this is not a specific story'. So [the film] is now actually nearer to the truth than I would like to admit." After the publication of the novel, Ihimaera and his wife remained married, but no longer lived together. In 1997 he published The Dream Swimmer, a sequel to his 1986 novel The Matriarch. His poem "O numi tutelar" was recited at the dawn opening of the British Museum's long-awaited 'Maori' Exhibition in 1998.

Later career: 2000 onwards

thumb|left|Ihimaera in [[Frankfurt in October 2012.]]

In the early 2000s Ihimaera published Woman Far Walking (2000), a play from the perspective of an elder Māori woman who has witnessed key historic events and who Ihimaera describes as the personification of the Treaty of Waitangi. Shortly after publication, book reviewer Jolisa Gracewood detected short passages from other writers, especially from historical sources, used without acknowledgement. Ihimaera apologised for not acknowledging the passages, said the omission was inadvertent and negligent, and pointed to many pages of other sources that he had acknowledged. The University of Auckland investigated the incident and ruled that Ihimaera's actions did not constitute misconduct in research, as the actions did not appear to be deliberate and Ihimaera had apologised. Gracewood subsequently found additional passages that had been copied without explanation, and the book's publisher Penguin Books removed the book from public sale. Ihimaera purchased the remaining stock himself. Some literary commentators, such as Vincent O'Sullivan, C.K. Stead and Mark Williams, criticised the university's response to the incident. Keith Sorrenson said that the events suggested Ihimaera had "learnt nothing" from his earlier plagiarism of Sorrenson's work in The Matriarch (1986).

His twelfth novel, The Parihaka Woman (2011), featured elements of the opera Fidelio and the history of Parihaka and the campaign of non-violent resistance. Reviewers for the Sunday Star-Times, Otago Daily Times and The New Zealand Herald were more negative, and all noted Ihimaera's use of an amateur historian as narrator; they noted that this device allowed him to add numerous citations and references, and avoid any further accusations of plagiarism, but detracted from the quality of the writing. It was followed by the short-story collection The Thrill of Falling (2012), in which Ihimaera explored a range of genres including contemporary comedy and science fiction. The second instalment, Native Son: A Writer's Memoir was published in 2019, and covers his early adult years in the 1960s and 1970s and how he became a published writer. After finishing Native Son, he decided to take a four-year break from writing, but ended up instead writing Navigating the Stars: Māori Creation Myths (2020), a modern re-telling of traditional Māori legends.

In 2019, the play Witi's Wāhine premiered at Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival. Written by playwright Nancy Brunning, who died in the same year, the play is a tribute to female characters in Ihimaera's works. Ihimaera wrote the script for a stage show adaptation of Navigating the Stars, produced by theatre company Taki Rua, which was performed at the Soundshell in the Wellington Botanic Garden in early 2021. In 2022, Pounamu Pounamu was re-issued by Penguin Random House with a new introduction by Ihimaera. In 2023, he edited an anthology of non-fiction Māori writing, Ngā Kupu Wero. Literary scholar and Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago Alistair Fox in The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction (2008) devotes four of the eleven chapters in the book to the writings of Ihimaera, indicating his importance within the context of New Zealand literature. Fox describes his epic novel The Matriarch as "one of the major and most telling 'monuments' of New Zealand's cultural history in the late twentieth century as far as the situation of Māori in this postcolonial society is concerned", noting that Ihimaera "has remained at the forefront of Māori arts and letters to an unprecedented degree, with an impressive output across a range of genres".

As part of the Auckland Arts Festival 2011, musician Charlotte Yates directed and produced the stage project "Ihimaera", featuring Ihimaera's lyrics about his life and works, and with performances by New Zealand musicians including Victoria Girling-Butcher, Paul Ubana Jones, Ruia Aperahama and Horomona Horo. Yates had previously created similar projects as tributes to New Zealand poets James K. Baxter and Hone Tuwhare, and chose Ihimaera for her third project because he was "a writer with a huge body of work that I can give to a number of musicians for them to put their heart and soul to". In the 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature. In 2009, following the restoration of titular honours by the New Zealand government, he declined redesignation as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

In 2004, Ihimaera received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington. In the same year, he undertook a residency in world literature at George Washington University, funded by Fulbright New Zealand. On receiving the award, Ihimaera said it was a recognition of his iwi: "Without them, I would have nothing to write about and there would be no Ihimaera. So this award is for all those ancestors who have made us all the people we are. It is also for the generations to come, to show them that even when you aren't looking, destiny has a job for you to do." In 2024, he was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.

Selected works

Novels, short-story collections and non-fiction

Pounamu Pounamu (1972, short-story collection)
Tangi (1973)
Whanau (1974)
The New Net Goes Fishing (1977, short-story collection)
The Matriarch (1986)
The Whale Rider (1987)
Dear Miss Mansfield: a tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1989, short-story collection)
Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies (1994)
Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995)
Te Kaieke Tohorā (Māori edition of The Whale Rider) (1995)
Kingfisher Come Home: the complete Maori stories (1995, short-story collection)
The Dream Swimmer (1997)
The Uncle's Story (2000)
Sky Dancer (2003)
Ihimaera: His Best Stories (2003, short-story collection)
Whanau II: The Anniversary Collection, or Band of Angels (2005)
The Rope of Man, combining Tangi and its sequel The Return (2005)
Ask at the Posts of the House (2007, short-story collection)
The Trowenna Sea (2009)
The Parihaka Woman (2011)
The Thrill of Falling (2011, short-story collection)
Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood (2014, memoir)
Sleeps Standing Moetū (2017, novella, with Hemi Kelly)
Native Son: A Writer's Memoir (2019, memoir)
The Astromancer: The Rising of Matariki (2022)

Anthologies and other edited works

Into the World of Light, edited by Ihimaera and D.S. Long (1982)
Te Ao Maramara Volume 1: Whakahuatanga o te rau (Reflections of Reality), selected and edited by Ihimaera, with contributing editors, Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D.S. Long (1992)
Te Ao Maramara Volume 2: He whakaatanga o te ao (The Reality) (1992)
Te Ao Maramara Volume 3: Puawaitanga o te korero (The Flowering) (1993)
Regaining Aotearoa: Māori writers speak out, edited by Ihimaera, D.S. Long, Irihapeti Ramsden and Haare Williams (1993)
Te Ao Maramara Volume 4: Te ara o te hau (The Path of the Wind) (1994)
Vision Aotearoa = Kaupapa New Zealand (1994)
100 Lovers of Taamaki Makaurau, edited by Ihimaera and Albert Wendt (1994)
Te Ao Maramara Volume 5: Te Torino (The Spiral) (1996)
Mataora = the living face: contemporary art (1996)
Growing up Māori (1998)
Where's Waari: a history of the Maori through the short story (2000)
Te Ata: Māori art from the East Coast, New Zealand, edited by Ihimaera and Ngarino Ellis, afterword by Katerina Te Heikōkō Mataira (2002)
Auckland: the city in literature (2003)
Get on the Waka: best recent Māori fiction (2007)
Black Marks on the White Page, edited by Ihimaera and Tina Makereti (2017)
Ngā Kupu Wero, edited by Ihimaera and with an introduction by Jacinta Ruru (2024)

Other works

Maori (1975, pamphlet)
New Zealand Through the Arts: past and present (1982, lecture)
Waituhi: the life of the village, by Ihimaera (libretto) and Ross Harris (composer) (1984, opera)
The Clio Legacy, by Ihimaera (libretto) and Dorothy Buchanan (1991, cantata)
Tanz Der Schwane, Ihimaera (libretto) and Ross Harris (composer) (1993, opera)
The Two Taniwha (1994, play)
Symphonic Legends, Ihimaera (text) and Peter Scholes (composer) (1996)
Land, Sea and Sky, Ihimaera (text) and Holger Leue (photographs) (1994)
Legendary Land, Ihimaera (text) and Holger Leue (photographs), with a foreword by Keri Hulme (1994)
Faces of the Land, Ihimaera (text) and Holger Leue (photographs) (1995)
Beautiful New Zealand, Ihimaera (text) and Holger Leue (photographs) (1997)
Beautiful North Island of New Zealand, Ihimaera (text) and Holger Leue (photographs) (1997)
Beautiful South Island of New Zealand, Ihimaera (text) and Holger Leue (photographs) (1997)
This is New Zealand, Ihimaera and Tim Plant (text) and Holger Leue (photographs) (1998)
On Top Down Under: photographs of unique New Zealanders, Ihimaera (text) and Sally Tagg (photographs) (1998)
New Zealand: first to see the dawn, Ihimaera (text) and Holger Leue (photographs) (1999)
Woman Far Walking (2000, play)
Galileo, by Ihimaera (libretto) and John Rimmer (composer) (2002, opera)
The Wedding, with choreographer Mark Baldwin and composer Gareth Farr (2006, ballet)
The Amazing Adventures of Razza the Rat (2006, children's book)
Navigating the Stars: Māori Creation Myths (2020)

References

External links

Māori-language biography, including list of works—At Māori Wikipedia
Read NZ Te Pou Muramura biography
Extensive bibliography in the New Zealand Literature File, archived copy as at 11 March 2008