Patricia Frances Grace (; born 17 August 1937) is a New Zealand writer of novels, short stories, and children's books. She began writing as a young adult, while working as a teacher. Her early short stories were published in magazines, leading to her becoming the first female Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, Waiariki, in 1975. Her first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps, followed in 1978.
Since becoming a full-time writer in the 1980s, Grace has written seven novels, seven short-story collections, a non-fiction biography and an autobiography. Her works explore Māori life and culture, including the impact of Pākehā (New Zealand European) and other cultures on Māori, with use of the Māori language throughout. Her most well-known novel, Potiki (1986) features a Māori community opposing the private development of their ancestral land. She has also written a number of children's books, seeking to write books in which Māori children can see their own lives.
Grace is a pioneering and influential figure in New Zealand literature, and over her career has won a number of awards, including the Kiriyama Prize, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, two honorary doctorates of literature, a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, and an Icon Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand for extraordinary lifetime achievement. Her books have twice won the top award for fiction at the New Zealand Book Awards. She was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DCNZM) in 2007, for services to literature.
Early life and career Patricia Grace is of Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa descent. She was born on 17 August 1937 in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was Māori and her mother was European and Irish Catholic. On her father's side she is descended from politician Wi Parata. She grew up in the suburb of Melrose, where her father had built the family home, and also spent time with her father's family at Hongoeka, on their ancestral land. In 1944, when she was seven, her father enlisted in the Māori Battalion to fight in the Second World War.
She attended St Anne's School in Wellington, where she later described experiencing racism: "I found that being different meant that I could be blamed – for a toy gun being stolen, for writing being chalked on a garage wall, for neighbourhood children swearing, for a grassy hillside being set alight". Grace has said that as a child she did not learn to speak Māori, because it was only spoken at formal events such as tangi (traditional Māori funeral ceremonies). She began to make efforts to learn as an adult, but found it difficult. She subsequently attended St Mary's College, where she excelled at basketball, and subsequently Wellington Teachers' Training College. It was not until she had left high school that she began to read works by New Zealand authors; she said that until this time, "I didn't kind of know that a writer was something one could aspire to be and that was partly because I'd never read writing by New Zealand writers". She began writing at age 25, while working full-time as a teacher in North Auckland.
Her first published short story was "The Dream", in bilingual magazine Te Ao Hou / The New World in 1966. In 1979, South Pacific Television produced a television version of this story for the show Pacific Viewpoint. She also had early stories published in the New Zealand Listener. These early works led to a publisher approaching Grace to ask her to work on a collection of short stories. In 1974 she received the first Māori Purposes Fund Board grant for Māori writers.
Literary career
1975–1990 Grace's first published book, Waiariki (1975), was the first collection of short stories to be published by a female Māori writer, and its ten stories show the diversity of Māori life and culture. Writer Rachel Nunns said these early stories "inform readers at an emotional, imaginative level with the sense of what it means to be a Maori". Grace's first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978), was about the relationship of a Māori woman and Pākehā man and their experiences coming from different cultures. It was inspired by the experiences of Grace's parents, and marked the first time a relationship of this kind had been described by a Māori writer. It was followed by her second collection of short stories The Dream Sleepers and Other Stories (1980). This collection featured a three-page story told by a mother speaking to her new baby, called "Between Earth and Sky", which is one of the best-known and most anthologised New Zealand short stories. These early works were critically acclaimed. In 1984 she collaborated with painter Robyn Kahukiwa to produce Wahine Toa: Women of Maori Myth, a book about women from Māori legends featuring Kahukiwa's paintings. Although she continued working as a full-time teacher until 1985, her income in this period was supplemented by grants from the New Zealand Literary Fund in 1975 and 1983.
In the early 1980s, Grace began writing for children, and sought to write books in which Māori children could see their own lives. The Kuia and the Spider / Te Kuia me te Pungawerewere (1981), illustrated by Kahukiwa, told the story of a spinning contest between a kuia (elderly Māori woman) and a spider, and was published by a group of women from the Spiral Collective in both English and Māori. Grace subsequently published Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street / Te Tuna Watakirihi me Nga Tamariki o te Tiriti o Toa (1984), also illustrated by Kahukiwa (and published in English, Māori and Samoan) and several Māori language readers. The Trolley (1993), illustrated by Kerry Gemmill, told the story of a single mother making a trolley for her children for Christmas.
In 1985, Grace received a writing fellowship at Victoria University of Wellington, which enabled her to give up teaching, become a full-time writer, and complete the novel Potiki (1986), which became her most successful novel. The plot of the novel featured a Māori community opposing the private development of their ancestral land, and the attempts of the developer to buy them out. The name "potiki" can mean "youngest child" or "last-born" in Māori, and refers to the central character of Toko, a child who foresees and is impacted by the conflict over the land. Grace intentionally did not include a glossary for Māori language terms in the book or italicise these terms, on the basis that she "didn't want the Māori language to be treated as a foreign language in its own country". The novel was viewed by some critics as political; John Beston, writing for Landfall, suggested that "having sought previously to soothe her Pakeha readers and to suppress her anger, [Grace] is now ready to charge them, not with past and irremediable injustices, but with continuing injustices". Grace said that she was endeavouring to write about "ordinary lives of ordinary people" and did not expect it to be seen as political. The novel has been translated into seven languages, and in 2020 was republished in Britain by the Penguin Classics imprint.
Grace was also active in the promotion of Māori arts during the 1980s. In 1983 she was a founding member of Haeata, a Māori women artists' collective, through which she guided young Māori women artists and participated in group exhibitions such as "Karanga Karanga" (1986), which was the first exhibition of collaborative work by Māori women artists in a public museum. In the late 1980s, she was a founding member of Te Hā, a collective of Māori writers. Her third short story collection, Electric City and Other Stories was published in 1987.
1990–2015
Grace's third novel, Cousins, was published in 1992. It is the story of three cousins across different parts of their lives. Like Māori culture as a whole it is concerned with whakapapa (family history) and family ties, rather than the success of the individual, and it reflects troubling parts of New Zealand's history such as the removal of Māori children from their families by the state. Academic Roger Robinson said that while the book sometimes seems like a polemic, "Grace's descriptive and impressionistic skills, her insight into the consciousness of women and children, and the sustained inwardness of the Māori perspective, make Cousins a significant and uniquely Māori version of the genre of family saga". Grace has used Cousins as an example of her approach to writing, which is to develop characters before developing plot: "I had an idea in mind that I was going to base the novel around two cousins, two women who shared the same ancestry, and during the course of the story the third cousin became important to the plot."
Her fourth novel, Baby No-Eyes, was published in 1998, having taken her five years to write. The book is narrated by an unborn child who was killed together with her father in a car accident, along with other members of her family, and weaves together family drama with contemporary Māori problems. Pauline Swain, reviewing the book for The Dominion, praised Grace's "deceptively light touch with material that in other hands could be bombastic or preachy", and noted "her portrayal of contemporary issues such as land claims and the right to use genetic information for research loses nothing in impact for all its delicately oblique handling". Nelson Wattie, writing in the New Zealand Review of Books, called it "profoundly disturbing" and lacking in coherence, but acknowledged that "the doubts expressed here run counter to the warmth with which this book, like others of its author, has been greeted elsewhere". It was soon followed by her fifth novel Dogside Story (2001) centred on a small seaside Māori community. Reviewer Simone Drichel observed that although the book shared some similarities in setting and characters with Potiki, the "nature of the challenges" faced by Maori had changed in the intervening years: "For the first time ... it is not primarily the interaction with Pakeha that poses a challenge for Maori, but Maoridom itself."
By this time, Grace had become an established and well-known writer. Elspeth Sandys observed in 2001 that the release of a new novel by Grace was "one of the more significant events in [New Zealand's] literary calendar". Her sixth novel, Tu (2004), was based on the experiences of the Māori Battalion in Italy during the Second World War, and in particular the experiences of Grace's father and other family members who were part of the Battalion. She described the experience of writing a book about "men and especially men at war" as a "wonderful challenge". Reviewer Iain Sharp praised Grace's compassionate treatment of the subject, concluding: "The crowning achievement of this fine writer's career, Tu will surely become one of the classics of our literature". In 2013 it was adapted for the theatre by New Zealand playwright Hone Kouka.