Tina Makereti named 2026 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow

The writer, whose essay collection won an Ockham award this year, receives a $43,000 grant for three months of writing in Menton, in the south of France.

Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore) has been named the 2026 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow, the New Zealand Society of Authors reported on 11 September.

The fellowship gives the recipient three months in Menton with a $43,000 grant to cover travel, insurance, living costs and accommodation. Fellows write in a room below the terrace of Villa Isola Bella, where Mansfield lived and worked in 1919 and 1920. Set up in 1970, it is the only privately funded international literary fellowship in Aotearoa and is open to writers of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, children's literature and plays. The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi manages it, with an advisory committee that includes members of the Winn-Manson Menton Trust.

Makereti's essay collection This Compulsion in Us won the general nonfiction award at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and her third novel, The Mires, was shortlisted for the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Her other books include The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke and Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings. She teaches a Master of Arts workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.

Makereti said the fellowship would let her step back from teaching and had already shaped her next project. Advisory committee chair Geraldine Baumann described her as "an exceptional writer" who moves easily between fiction and nonfiction.

Past fellows include Witi Ihimaera, Elizabeth Knox, Lloyd Jones, Dame Fiona Kidman and Selina Tusitala Marsh.