Beautiful North Island of New Zealand

Witi Ihimaera was born in Gisborne, New Zealand and now lives in Auckland. He has had a varied life as a labourer, postman, journalist, diplomat and university lecturer. His first book, Pounamu, Pounamu was published in 1972 and won the Freda Buckland Prize for best first book by a new writer, and third prize in the Wattie Book of the Year Award. With Tangi, his first novel, published in 1973, he became the first Maori novelist and won first prize in the Wattie Award of that year. Witi Ihimaera has won first prize again in the Watties with The Matriarch in 1986 and second prize, as editor of the acclaimed Te Ao Marama landmark series of Maori writing since 1980, in five volumes, in 1993. In 1994, with Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies, Witi Ihimaera won the Wattie (now called the Montana) Book of the Year Award for the third time - the only writer in New Zealand to have done so. In 1994 he was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and spent a year in Menton, France.