As Grace’s 1986 novel Potiki is republished in Britain, the writer talks about culture, politics and activism
“We live by the sea, which hems and stitches the scalloped edges of the land,” writes New Zealand author Patricia Grace of the beachside town that is the setting for her novel, Potiki. The land in the book bears a striking resemblance to the settlement where Grace lives, and walking up the coastal road to her home in Hongoeka Bay, north of Wellington, you can see things the way her characters do: the dark morning sea, “strident bands” of gulls, and the capital’s notoriously “edged wind”.
In 1975, Grace, now 82, was the first Māori woman to publish a book of short stories in New Zealand, despite the fact that she had not – by the time she finished high school – read a book by a local writer, let alone an Indigenous one.
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