Tina Robyn Makereti (Dahlberg)

Tina was born in Kawakawa and was educated at Takapuna Grammar. She went on to study at Massey University where she graduated with a B.A. She currently lives in Canada and has two daughters.

"Tina's newest short story, ‘Black Milk’, recently won the Pacific Regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2016). Her first novel, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (Vintage, 2014) has been described as ‘a remarkable [book that] spans generations of Moriori, Māori and Pākehā descendants as they grapple with a legacy of pacifism, violent domination and cross-cultural dilemmas.’ It was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction, also won by her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (Huia, 2011). In 2009 Tina was the recipient of 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. She has been writer in residence at Randell Cottage, Wellington, and the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt. Makereti has a PhD Creative Writing from Victoria University, and is Curator Māori at Museums Wellington. In 2014 she convened the first Māori & Pasifika Writing Workshop at the IIML - Te Hīringa a Tuhi. She is of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngāti Rangatahi, Pākehā and, according to family stories, Moriori descent. She now lives on the Kāpiti Coast with her partner, daughters, unruly dog and two chickens."

In 2016 she won the Commonwealth Writers' Short Story Prize in the Pacific Region for her story Black Milk which was a response to Fiona Pardington's photograph 'Uncanny Tui/Kakahu' (2008) which was exhibited in A Beautiful Hesitation exhibition. With Witi Ihimaera she co-edited the fiction anthology Black Marks on the White Page in 2017. She was Curator Māori at the Museums Wellington, was writer in residence at the Ursula Bethell Writers' Residency in Ōtautahi in 2022, and leads postgraduate workshops for the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Biographical sources

• Phone conversations with Ravelle Jaggard, 28 and 29 March, 2004.
• http://www.tinamakereti.com/ 12 September 2016. HIWI: Contemporary Māori Short Stories. Ed. Paula Morris. Consulting Ed. Darryn Joseph. Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press 2023. 163.