Potiki

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Summary

'Provocative, compassionate and beautiful' - Joy Harjo, US Poet Laureate

WINNER OF THE 1987 NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARD; WINNER OF THE 2008 NEUSTADT INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

A moving story of a Maori community's fight for survival, from one of New Zealand's most prominent and celebrated authors

On the remote coast of New Zealand, at the curve that binds the land and the sea, a small Maori community live, work, fish, play and tell stories of their ancestors. But something is changing. The prophet child toko can sense it. Men are coming, with dollars and big plans to develop the area for tourism. As their ancestral land becomes threatened, the people must unite in a battle for survival.

Weaving together myth and memory, Patricia Grace's prize-winning novel is a spellbinding portrait of a defiant community determined to protect their way of life at any cost.

Reviews

A searching examination of human nature [by] a canonical figure in postcolonial and Maori literature . . . a timely arrival, praising the strength and the resilience of the human spirit whilst capturing, in moments of crystallising clarity, the tragic masochism of its pain and sorrow.
Arts Desk

About the author

Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace is one of New Zealand's most prominent and celebrated authors and a figurehead of modern Indigenous literature. She garnered initial acclaim in the 1970s with her collection of short stories entitled Waiariki (1975) - the first published book by a Maori woman. She has published six novels and seven short story collections, as well as a number of books for children and a work of non-fiction. She won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for Potiki in 1987, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2001 with Dogside Story, which also won the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize. In 2008 she won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

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