The Whale Rider

Witi Ihimaera is one of New Zealand’s most prolific and accomplished writers. Witi’s first novel, Tangi, won the Wattie Book of the Year Award in 1974, a feat he repeated with The Matriarch in 1986. His celebrated novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies, now adapted as the film Mahana, won the Montana Book Award in 1995. Witi’s other novels and short story collections include The Whale Rider (also adapted as an internationally successful film), Dream Swimmer (sequel to the award-winning The Matriarch), Pounamu Pounamu, and Nights in the Gardens of Spain. In 2015 he published the first volume of his autobiography, Māori Boy. Lily Gladstone (foreword) made history by becoming the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress and the first Native American performer to be nominated for best actress, at the 2024 Academy Awards for Killers of the Flower Moon. Shilo Kino (introduction) is an Indigenous author from Aotearoa (New Zealand). She is a descendant of the tribes Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Maniapoto. Her debut novel, The Porangi Boy, won the Young Adult Fiction Award at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults in 2021. Her second novel, All That We Know, was published by Mao Press in 2024. As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian (New Zealand) and multiple other media outlets in New Zealand, exploring themes of social justice, identity, and belonging.