April 07, 2022
Rhyme search part of award winning effort
The story of a koro teaching his moko about Matariki has won the 2022 Storylines Te Kahurangi Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira Award for an unpublished manuscript in Māori.
Brianne Te Paa says she wrote Kua Whetūrangitia Tōku Koro in English, and then tackled the te reo version after getting attention from Huia Publishers after sharing the poem on Facebook.
The Kaipara College assistant principal was worried the rhymes wouldn’t translate well to Māori.
“Our words are quite easy to find rhyming partners with, so it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. Rhyming in te reo still has its challenges, but it ended up being the same story,” Te Paa says.
She was honoured to receive a tohu named for Kāterina Mataira, whose writing played a big part in revitalising te reo Māori.