Hiwa : Contemporary Maori Short Stories

Kia hiwa ra ki tenei tuku, kia hiwa ra ki tena tuku! E, ko te paenga pakipoto ka rewa i te pae pukapuka nekeneke mai, nukunuku mai ki tenei huihuinga kaituhi Maori, ki tenei pukenga whakaaro tuatini, hi!

— From the Kupu Whakamihi by Darryn Joseph

Hiwa is a vibrant, essential collection of contemporary Maori short stories, featuring twenty-seven writers working in English or te reo Maori. The writers range from famous names and award winners – Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Whiti Hereaka, Becky Manawatu, Zeb Nicklin – to emerging voices like Shelley Burne-Field, Jack Remiel Cottrell, Anthony Lapwood and Colleen Maria Lenihan.

A showcase of contemporary talent, Hiwa includes biographical introductions for each writer’s work, and explores the range of styles and subjects in the flourishing world of Maori fiction.

Named for Hiwa-i-te-rangi, the ninth star of Matariki, signifying vigorous growth and dreams of the year ahead, this anthology reveals the flourishing world of Maori writing today, in Aotearoa and beyond.

From the introduction:

Hiwa represents a gathering of Maori writers, of different styles and points of view, born and based in different places, with wildly varying relationships to – and knowledge of – their whakapapa. The churning spirals of writers’ lives in the twenty-first century mean that some of the stories also form part of contemporary Australian writing, and American writing. Scholars will find other sets and subsets – Indigenous, Postcolonial, Oceanic, Pacific – and identify genres like realism, crime, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and so on. No writer, and no story, is just one thing . . . .

[The book] marks the vigorous growth of story-writing by Maori writers in the twenty-first century, each of us building on centuries of precedent, both spoken and written. It also sends a wish soaring high into the night: for more writers to give the short story serious consideration, and for more readers to explore its artful pleasures and possibilities. More stories, more readers, more stars falling from the sky and taking shape in a world that is constantly re-written and re-imagined.