November 04, 2020
Stories from Maui to Shakespeare guided artist leader
Poet, broadcaster, teacher and artist Haare Williams says stories have been key to building his understanding of the world.
Haare Williams: Words of a Kaumātua, edited by Witi Ihimaera, took out the Māori award at this year's New Zealand Society of Authors’ Heritage Book Awards.
He says the stories he heard growing up with his grandparents on the shores of Ōhiwa Harbour set him up for life.
"Stories of Maui that teach us about greed and waste, those things are implicit in my early childhood and of course stories in the Bible and later in high school turning to Shakespeare so I saw the parallels of language, the beauty of the English language, the beauty of te reo, and those things fused together," Williams says.
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