37 Facts About Witi Ihimaera

Witi Ihimaera was the first Maori writer to publish a collection of short stories, with Pounamu, Pounamu, and the first to publish a novel, with Tangi.

Witi Ihimaera has said that "Maori culture is the taonga, the treasure vault from which I source my inspiration".

Witi Ihimaera has since published two volumes of his memoirs: Maori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood and Native Son: The Writer's Memoir.

Witi Ihimaera was born in Gisborne, a city in the east of New Zealand's North Island and is of Maori descent.

Witi Ihimaera has affiliations to Ngai Tuhoe, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Ngati Kahungunu, Ngai Tamanuhiri, Rongowhakaata, Ngati Porou, and Whakatohea.

Witi Ihimaera began writing at a young age, and in later life recounted writing stories on the wall of his childhood bedroom.

Witi Ihimaera attended Te Karaka District High School for three years and the Church College of New Zealand in Temple View, Hamilton, for one year, after which he completed his final year of schooling at Gisborne Boys' High School.

Witi Ihimaera has said that he became interested in becoming a writer when he was fifteen and realised that Maori did not feature in the books he read.

Witi Ihimaera found the story "so poisonous" that he threw the book out of the window and was caned for doing so.

Witi Ihimaera 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.

Witi Ihimaera met librarian and student Jane Cleghorn at university, and they married in 1970.

Witi Ihimaera began writing seriously in 1969, around the age of 25, and had his first short story "The Liar" accepted for publication by the New Zealand Listener magazine in May 1970.

Witi Ihimaera's first book, Pounamu Pounamu, was a collection of short stories, which was awarded third prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards in 1973.

Witi Ihimaera has said it was rejected by three publishers before being accepted by the fourth.

Witi Ihimaera was the first Maori writer to publish a collection of short stories and the first to publish a novel.

Norman Kirk, then the prime minister of New Zealand, read Pounamu Pounamu and arranged for Witi Ihimaera to be employed as a writer at the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1973.

Witi Ihimaera subsequently worked as a diplomat with posts in Canberra, New York City, and Washington, DC In 1975 he was the recipient of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, and in 1982 he received a Victoria University of Wellington writing fellowship.

Witi Ihimaera instead began working on the anthology Into the World of Light, together with co-editor Don Long.

When Witi Ihimaera began writing again, he wrote The Matriarch which examined the impacts of European colonisation on Maori, and which again received first prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards.

Not long after publication, it came to light that Witi Ihimaera had used passages from the entry on Maori land in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, written by Keith Sorrenson, without acknowledgement.

Mark Williams later noted that the consequences for Witi Ihimaera were minor, and he became a professor in the year of the book's publication.

Witi Ihimaera wrote a libretto for an opera by Ross Harris, based on his second novel Whanau, and Dear Miss Mansfield, a rewriting of Katherine Mansfield's short stories from a Maori perspective, in response to celebrations of 100 years since her birth.

Witi Ihimaera later became Professor of English and Distinguished Creative Fellow in Maori Literature, until 2010.

Witi Ihimaera was awarded a Scholarship in Letters in 1991.

Witi Ihimaera published The Uncle's Story, a love story about two generations of gay Maori men, children's picture book The Little Kowhai Tree, and the novel Sky Dancer, featuring Maori myths with contemporary characters.

In 2009, Witi Ihimaera published The Trowenna Sea, a novel about the early history of Tasmania.

Witi 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 Witi Ihimaera's actions did not constitute misconduct in research, as the actions did not appear to be deliberate and Witi Ihimaera had apologised.

Keith Sorrenson said that the events suggested Witi Ihimaera had "learnt nothing" from his earlier plagiarism of Sorrenson's work in The Matriarch.

In 2019, the play Witi Ihimaera's Wahine premiered at Te Tairawhiti Arts Festival.

Witi 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.

Witi Ihimaera has been recognised as "one of the world's leading indigenous writers".

Literary scholar and Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago Alistair Fox in The Ship of Dreams: Masculinity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction devotes four of the eleven chapters in the book to the writings of Witi 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 Maori in this postcolonial society is concerned", noting that Witi Ihimaera "has remained at the forefront of Maori arts and letters to an unprecedented degree, with an impressive output across a range of genres".

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 2004, Witi Ihimaera received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington.

In 2017, Witi Ihimaera was awarded a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement.