Witi Ihimaera champions Māori writers with 2025 mentorship programmes

Author Witi Ihimaera. Photo / Doug Sherring

• Witi Ihimaera chairs Te Kaituhi Māori, which has opened applications for its 2025 mentorship programmes.
• The programmes aim to foster emerging Māori writers, offering guidance from experienced mentors like Paula Morris.
• Ihimaera praised the initiative, noting the joy in seeing new Māori voices and ideas emerge.

As well as being an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Witi Ihimaera is also chairman of Te Kaituhi Māori, the Māori writers' organisation within the New Zealand Society of Authors.

Te Kaituhi Māori has just opened applications for its 2025 Kupu Kaitiaki and Kaituhi Māori programmes, fostering emerging and developing Māori writers.

It’s a “mighty mentor programme,” Ihimaera told RNZ’s Nights.

“In the past people like Paula Morris, people like Emma Hislop, Steph Matuku and Tanya Roxborogh have been the mentors.

“And so, whoever goes in for this Māori mentor programme, they get the best teaching, and we hope will become the best in the next 20 years.”

Such mentor programmes didn’t exist when Ihimaera was himself a young writer, but that may have helped him find his voice, he said.

“I had to begin my career from a Māori perspective, and a Māori point of view.

“Had I possibly had help from Pākehā institutions, then I possibly could have started to write in Pākehā ways and according to Pākehā frameworks.”

The Kaituhi Māori mentorship programme happened for the first time in 2024. When Ihimaera read through the work produced it brought him great joy, he said.

“It was so incredibly awesome that, there are times when I almost wept with excitement and with joy, because I’m an old writer, I’m now 81 and to be able to see that there was a cohort of new rangatahi writers, fresh voices, refreshing ideas of who we were and people you know were mentoring them with so much generosity. It was just, an incredible experience.”