Ockham NZ Book Award www.nzbookawards.nz
General Non-Fiction Award Winner 2026
The Judges wrote; "Tina Makereti is better known as a writer of fiction, and she uses her well-honed literary skills to advantage in this artful and skilfully curated collection of essays, adding up to an alternative memoir of one person’s discoveries about her whakapapa and childhood family, and her place in national society and within Māori literature. The linked essays build with a growing sense of connection, as Makereti craftily balances the wider social context and her own fascinating life story. Complex yet universal, This Compulsion in Us is an honest, revealing and stimulating work, and a celebration of writing as a timeless way of experiencing and understanding the world and ourselves."
It’s not beautiful, not at all, when it’s there in front of you, but writing transforms.
In her first book of nonfiction, prizewinning author Tina Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and into a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment.
Makereti stands at the foot of her mounga and pays careful attention to tohu. With her tūpuna at her elbow she casts around for home, meets taonga in museums, and writes her way towards her father. She walks through the darkness with others, in awe of Te Kore, Te Pō and Te Ao Mārama—a universe of potential being, dark and light. These are some of the kaupapa that underpin her work and her way of moving through the world, both enlivened and haunted by a compulsion to write.
Included here are frank and moving essays about the wāhine who have shown her many ways of being a Māori woman, the pain and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism. What if we could transform the events that made us who we are? What if there were a way back to the beginning?
By turns lyrical, personal and critical, This Compulsion In Us is many things all at once, and an unforgettable portrait of one of Aotearoa’s foremost storytellers.
Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) is the author of three acclaimed novels: Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings, The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, and most recently The Mires. In 2022, her essay ‘Lumpectomy’ won the Landfall Essay Prize, and in 2016, her short story ‘Black Milk’ won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the Pacific Region. Her first novel won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction, also won by her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, in 2011.
Alongside Witi Ihimaera, she co-edited Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing. Tina has curated exhibitions on social and cultural history at Wellington Museum, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision and the Courtenay Place light boxes, and been guest curator for book festivals. She has been awarded numerous residencies and presented her work in Australia, Frankfurt, Taipei, Jamaica, Canada and the UK. Tina teaches a Master of Arts in Creative Writing workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
320 pages
H: 210mm W: 138mm