Ihimaera guest of honour at Montreal festival

Gisborne-born writer Witi Ihimaera is heading to Canada next month as guest of honour at the 33rd International First People’s Festival. Picture by Maja Moritz

Māori author Witi Ihimaera will be the guest of honour at the 33rd International First Peoples’ Festival in Montreal next month.

The multidisciplinary festival includes concerts, dances, poetry and more than 60 films.

It is billed as a flagship event for artistic creation and the cultural renaissance of indigenous peoples — “a place of creation, encounters and discoveries”.

Gisborne-born Ihimaera will take part in the official opening of the festival on August 8 and several other activities will mark his visit.

These will be announced this week when the full festival programme is unveiled.

A festival press release says “Ihimaera considers ‘the world in which I live to be Māori, not European’, and his fiction develops out of this perspective.

“He creates imaginative new realities for his readers, drawing from autobiographical experience.”

His novel, The Whale Rider, became an international blockbuster film. Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood won the General Non-Fiction Award at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

More recently, Ihimaera was recognised for his fictional work with the 2017 New Zealand Prime Minister’s Literary Achievement Award.

Ihimaera is of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki descent, with close ties to Tūhoe, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Kahungunu, and Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, and connections to Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Porou and Te Whakatohea iwi.

His family marae is the Pere family home, Rongopai, in Waituhi, near Gisborne.

Paintings which adorn the interior of the meeting house have been described in great detail in his writings.

An imaginative recreation of Waituhi village serves as the setting for many of his stories.