'Whale Rider' Author Witi Ihimaera to Give Bookworm Talk, Mar 24

As the first published author of New Zealand's Māori Aboriginal minority, Witi Ihimaera has taken tales that are very specific to his culture and homeland and turned them into universally acclaimed, awardwinning works.

The 73-year-old author of books like Whale Rider – which was also adapted into a film of the same name – has long been praised for not only exploring his people's culture in his novels and short stories, but has also perhaps received even more fanfare for shedding light on complex and often contemporary Māori issues in those works. The film adaptation of Whale Rider, a heroines tail about a Māori girl engaged in a timeless tribal struggle against her narrow-minded grandfather, was not only critically acclaimed but also lead to its star, the then 13-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, to be the youngest nominee for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

The BBC called Ihimaera's book a "magical, lore-laden novel" but despite those successes, Ihimaera has also been dogged by criticism and controversy after a detractor accused him of plagiarizing passages of his book The Trowenna Sea in 2009. He apologized for the mistake and insisted it was unintentional, but it remained a stain on his reputation for years, prompting him to annotate his subsequent book, The Parihaka Woman "within an inch of its life" according to an unflinching profile of the author in Noted Magazine.

That article is a complex portrait of a flawed, multifaceted and endlessly fascinating author. If you want to learn even more about Ihimaera, you can listen to this interview about his the 2014 memoir, Māori Boy, in which he chronicles the first 15 years of his life. We hope that his talk at The Bookworm will be an equally frank and illuminating glimpse into the thinking of arguably New Zealand's best author.

Witi Ihimaera will be at The Bookworm on Friday March 24, 7.30pm. Admission is RMB 40 for members, RMB 50 otherwise. For more information click here. Our event listing for the talk is here.

More stories by this author here.

Email: kylemullin@thebeijinger.com
Twitter: @MulKyle

Photo: Stuff.co.nz