On Sunday night, Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe, Waitaha) won the Keri Hulme Award, hot on the heels of her Sargeson Prize win last week.
The Aotearoa author of the phenomenally successful novel Auē and its critically acclaimed sequel, Kataraina, has just won two of the country’s most prestigious literary awards: The Sargeson Prize for Short Fiction, worth $15,000; and the Keri Hulme Award, worth $5,000.
The 2025 Sargeson Prize judge Elizabeth Knox selected Manawatu’s short story, ‘The Vase’, from over 1,160 entries to take out this year’s first prize in the Open Division. At the award ceremony on October 13, Knox said Manawatu’s story is powerfully moody and has plot and mystery. “It keeps offering solutions to its mysteries that all feel possibly true – which is a real accomplishment. ‘The Vase’ is an unsettling work that ends with the dilemma of its protagonist’s sense that they’ve lost everything, and that what they’ve lost leaves them alone, but will never leave them in peace.” The story is published in full on Newsroom.
Becky Manawatu (left) and Secondary Schools Division winner, Brooke Smith (Waiuku College).
Last night, on October 19, Manawatu was awarded the biennial Keri Hulme Award for her second novel, Kataraina. The honour is part of the Pikihuia Awards which celebrate emerging Māori writers in te reo Māori and English, as well as mid-career Māori writers. The awards ceremony was held at Te Puia in Rotorua as part of Kupu Māori Writers Festival.
The Keri Hulme Award is supported by funds raised from the sale of the original manuscript of Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the bone people. The proceeds of the auction were gifted to the Māori Literature Trust to manage the award which is intended to recognise a mid-career Māori writer who represents the “values Keri Hulme [Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe] embodied through her work and storytelling.” The honour includes $5000 and guardianship of the Keri Hulme Award taonga for two years. Manawatu is the second ever recipient, after essa may ranapiri who won the inaugural award in 2023.
Mary McCallum, Manawatu’s publisher at Mākaro Press said: “For Becky to win this prize in the name of the West Coast’s most famous writer, someone Becky has long admired, is an unquantifiable boost to her confidence as a writer, especially coming hard on the heels of the Sargeson Prize. It will give her the strength and self-belief she needs to apply her extraordinary talent to new projects, as well as helping buy her more time to write. What many don’t know is that Becky Manawatu has shouldered huge personal hardships to write, publish and promote her books, persevering when many would have found it too hard, and constantly experimenting with and growing her fiction so it properly represents the stories she wants to tell as a Kāi Tahu kaituhi. We could not be more proud of her.”
Manawatu gave a heartfelt speech thanking her whānau, her publishers Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart at Mākaro Press, and Keri’s Hulme’s whānau for making this award happen, along with the Māori Literature Trust. “It means a lot to us writers, who have looked to Keri and her legacy often in our careers,” she said. “I feel honoured to be a part of a vast and growing, sprawling and wild greater story of us.” Manawatu continued the tradition, started by essa may ranapiri, of offering a poem in gratitude:
Ngā kēhua
To Joe and Kerewin’s Simon,
I never want to be free of the weight of you,
don’t leave me at my desk alone.
If I never carried these ghosts on my shoulders,
who would I even be.
I think I would float up, away from the stories
the anchoring kupu that make me believe in
something truer than the truth
Did I know tears?
I thought I did. Indulged the prayers.
But that’s not truer than the truth.
That is a delusion.
Because here is a picture of me and, you, my silent cousin, lying in the grass and I am smiling the smile of the lucky one.
You knew tears, my silent cousin.
What will happen if I let you be
free of the weight of me, e tama?
Will we weigh nothing at all.
Like in the photo,
like on the grass,
like in the bed when you peeled the thin skin from my back
after I had been sunburned,
and we went to the window and watched my skin float up into the night
Like a ghost, weighing nothing at all.
Weighing nothing at all.
As if those that might hurt
the people
we love
had never been born.
Kia ora tātou.
Mauri ora. / Becky Manawatu
Becky Manawatu accepting the Keri Hulme Award. (Photo: Kararaina Pene.)
All winners and highly commended writers for the 2025 Pikihuia Awards are:
The Keri Hulme Award, judged by Robyn Bargh and Nic Low and sponsored by the Hulme whānau
Winner: Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe, Waitaha) for Kataraina
Poetry – te reo Māori, judged by Hēmi Kelly
Winner: Aperahama Te Kapua-I-Waho Hurihanganui (Wairarapa, Te Arawa, Te Tai Rāwhiti) for ‘Te Matatini’
Highly commended: Aperahama Te Kapua-I-Waho Hurihanganui (Wairarapa, Te Arawa, Te Tai Rāwhiti) for ‘Kīngi Tūheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII’
Highly commended: Te Aomihia Kaipara (Ngāti Naho, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe) for ‘Kia ū, kia mau!’
Poetry in English, judged by Tayi Tibble
Winner: Shelley Burne-Field (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Rārua, Te Ātiawa) for ‘skin’
Highly commended: Jessica Hinerangi Thompson-Carr (Ngāruahine, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāpuhi) for ‘Tīpuna go fishing to catch another mokopuna’
Highly commended: Marama Salsano (Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Wairere) for ‘Calabashes in my mouth’
Short story – te reo Māori, judged by Maiki Sherman
Winner: Darryn Joseph (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Rereahu) for ‘Te Hapori Whanokē’
Highly commended: Darryn Joseph (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Rereahu) for ‘He Kōrero Parāoa’
Highly commended: Hāwea Apiata (Ngāti Kura, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Toarangatira) for ‘Te Tohunga me te Pirihi’
Short story in English, judged by Carol Hirschfeld
Winner: Mark Horsefield (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Rehia) for ‘The Sea Within’
Highly commended: Anthony Kohere (Ngāti Porou, Rongowhakaata, Muaūpoko, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) for ‘L!PSTICK CALLS’
Highly commended: Toni Pivac-Hohaia (Ngāti Whātua, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Pūkenga) for ‘Paradise Duck’
Tauira Short Story Award, judged by Mike Ross
Winner: Tamihana Simmonds (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Huri, Pikitū Marae) for ‘The Price of War’
Highly commended: Sarah Rose Mautoka Wilson (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou) for ‘Twilight’s Wake’
The finalists from the awards have been published in Huia Short Stories 16 (Huia Publishers, $25, available at Unity Books), which was launched at the awards ceremony.