Hone Tuwhare

Profile
Hone Tuwhare is one of New Zealand’s most popular poets. He has twice won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and has held many international writing fellowships. With the publication of No Ordinary Sun in 1964, Tuwhare became the first published Māori poet – and has remained an icon of the Māori arts community and a national treasure. He died in January 2008.

Selected published works
No Ordinary Sun, 1964; Deep River Talk: Collected Poems, 1993; Shape-Shifter, 1997, Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry 1998; Piggy-Back Moon, 2001, Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry 2002; Oooooo!!! New Poems, 2005.

Publishers
Steele Roberts Ltd www.steeleroberts.co.nz

Biography
Hone Tuwhare was born in Kaikohe in 1922 of Ngā Puhi descent and educated in Auckland. He was encouraged to write by the renowned New Zealand poet R.A.K. Mason while an apprentice at the Otahuhu Railway Workshops (1939-44).

Tuwhare’s debut collection No Ordinary Sun, published in 1964, was the first book by a Māori poet. Reprinted ten times over the next thirty years, it is one of the most widely read single collections ever produced by a New Zealand poet.

Tuwhare was awarded the Burns Fellowship at Otago University in 1969 and held it again in 1974. The seventies were a fruitful decade, in which he produced Come Rain Hail (1970), Sap-Wood & Milk (1972), Something Nothing (1974), and Making a Fist of It: Poems and Short Stories (1978). Further publications in subsequent years included Mihi: Collected Poems (1987) and Deep River Talk (1993).

Tuwhare’s writing makes striking use of a multitude of poetic voices and registers, ranging from the vernacular to the self-consciously declamatory. This is poetry that is playful, mercurial even, and which gains a new life when read aloud – especially by the poet himself.

Tuwhare is deservedly reckoned to be a New Zealand literary icon, and was among ten named as Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artists at a ceremony in 2003. He has received an Honorary Doctorate from Otago University and he has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Shape-Shifter won Tuwhare his first Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. In 1999, he was named the second Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate and at the end of his two-year term he produced Piggy-Back Moon, which won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry the following year. In 2003 he was awarded the inaugural Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry. He died in January 2008 at the age of 86.