Becky Manawatu

Becky Manawatu (born 1982) is a New Zealand writer of Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe, Waitaha, and Pākehā background.[1] In 2020, she won two Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her first novel, Auē[2][3] and Best Crime Novel at the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards.

Biography

Manawatu was born Becky Wixon in June 1982 in Nelson, New Zealand, and raised in Waimangaroa on the West Coast of the South Island, 15 minutes from Westport, attending Waimangaroa Primary School.[1][4] She met her husband Tim while at Buller High School and has two children, Siena and Maddox.[1][3] Manawatu left home at age 18 years to accompany her husband's career as a professional rugby player and coach in Italy and Frankfurt, Germany.[3] The couple returned to New Zealand in 2016 to Nelson, where Manawatu began a Diploma in Writing at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.[1] After six months the couple moved back to Waimangaroa, and Manawatu began working as a reporter at the Westport News, the smallest independent daily newspaper in New Zealand.[1][3]

Writing

Manawatu began writing her first novel, Auē, while living in Frankfurt, and first approached publisher Mary McCallum of Mākaro Press in April 2016.[3] She continued it in Nelson under the working title Pluck, submitting three chapters to McCallum in November 2016 and a manuscript in January 2017; it eventually went through five rounds of editing over a year.[1][3] Much of the novel was written in a family friend's house at the mouth of the Mōkihinui River north of Westport. A formative experience that led to the novel was the murder of Manawatu's 10-year-old cousin Glen Bo Duggan by his abusive stepfather when Manawatu was 11.[1][3] The novel tells the story of eight-year-old orphan Arama sent to live with rural relatives at Kaikōura and his teenage brother Tauriki.[5]

Manawatu was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2018, and an essay of hers was selected for a Landfall anthology.[1]

Auē was published by Mākaro Press in August 2019 in a run of 500 copies, and was launched at Whare Tangaroa, a clifftop house at Cape Foulwind.[3] On 12 May 2020 it won the $55,000 Jann Medicott Acorn Prize for Fiction (New Zealand's richest literary prize), as well as the Hubert Church Prize for best first book of fiction, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.[6][3] It also won the Best Crime Novel and was shortlisted for the Best First Novel at the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards.[5] The judges described it as "a breath-taking expose of lives lived on the margins, and the fight for redemption and absolution".[5] Auē was the best-selling New Zealand novel of 2020.[1]

Manawatu won the 2021 Robert Burns Fellowship to work on her next novel, titled Papahaua, in Dunedin.[1]

References
  1. Arnold, Naomi (10 December 2020). "Becky's story". Greymouth Star. p. 5.
  2. "Winners | New Zealand Book Awards Trust". www.nzbookawards.nz. Retrieved 12 August 2020.
  3. Braunias, Steve (14 May 2020). "Book of the year: The making of Auē". Newsroom. Retrieved 12 August 2020.
  4. Matthews, Philip (20 March 2020). "Words from the dark: writer Becky Manawatu and the real story behind her novel". Stuff. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  5. "Ngaio Marsh Award 2020 winners announced". Books+Publishing. 2 November 2020. Retrieved 2 November 2020.
  6. "Manawatu wins New Zealand Book Award for fiction". Books+Publishing. 13 May 2020. Retrieved 12 August 2020.
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