Tina Makereti is a New Zealand novelist, essayist, short-story writer, editor and creative writing teacher. She is of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore and Pākehā descent, and, according to family stories, Moriori descent. Her fiction and creative non-fiction deal with cultural identity, history, prejudice, coloniality and the legacies of cross-cultural encounter in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Life and education
Makereti was born in Kawakawa, in the Northland Region of New Zealand, and grew up in various parts of the North Island, including Auckland. She studied at Massey University, graduating with a BA in Social Sciences (1994) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Māori Studies (2007). She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington in 2008, which led to the publication of her first book, and a PhD in Creative Writing there in 2013; her doctoral work used Indigenous literary perspectives to examine how identity is understood and transmitted following colonisation.
She has taught creative writing at Massey University and, since February 2020, has been a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington's International Institute of Modern Letters and School of English, where she convenes a Master of Arts creative writing workshop. In 2014 she was convenor of Te Hiringa a Tuhi, the first Māori and Pasifika writing workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters. She lives on the Kāpiti Coast. Her daughter, Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, is also a published writer.
Work
Makereti's short-story collection Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (Huia Publishers, 2010) combines mythological and contemporary material. Her first novel, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (Vintage, 2014), spans generations of Moriori, Māori and Pākehā descendants and was a New Zealand bestseller. The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke (Penguin Random House, 2018) gives voice to a young Māori man exhibited in the Egyptian Hall in London in the 1840s; while it has been described as based on the life of Hemi Pomara, the author's note states that the novel "in no way represents the real historical figure." Her third novel, The Mires, was published in 2024–2025, with editions in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Spain and a French edition forthcoming. A collection of essays, This Compulsion in Us, appeared in 2025.
With Witi Ihimaera she co-edited Black Marks on the White Page (2017), an anthology of Māori and Pasifika short fiction. Her shorter writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including Sport, Landfall, Metro, The New Zealand Listener, Hue and Cry, JAAM, Turbine and Overland Aotearoa.
Recognition
Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa won the inaugural fiction prize at the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards in 2011, and Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings won the Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction in 2014 and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award in 2016. In 2009 Makereti received the Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing (non-fiction) and the Pikihuia Award for Best Short Story Written in English. Her story "Black Milk" was the Pacific regional winner of the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and in 2016 she was awarded the NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship. She held writing residencies at the Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt (2012), was New Zealand Film Archive Curator-at-Large (2013) and Randell Cottage Writer in Residence (2014). Her essay "Lumpectomy" won the 2022 Landfall Essay Competition. The Mires was a finalist for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and This Compulsion in Us won the General Non-fiction Award at the same awards the following year. In 2026 she was named the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow. Her work has been presented in New Zealand and internationally, including in Frankfurt, Taipei, Jamaica, Toronto and the United Kingdom.
