Whiti Hereaka

Whiti Hereaka is an award-winning novelist and playwright of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Tuhourangi, Ngāti Tumatawera, Tainui and Pākehā descent, based in Wellington, New Zealand. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing (Scriptwriting) from the International Institute of Modern Letters.

In 2012, Whiti was the recipient of the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award. Her play Rewena, written during her writer in residency at the Michael King Writers Centre in 2012, has been performed nationally and was published in the anthology Here/Now in 2015.

During 2018 and 2019, Whiti worked as a scriptwriter on the second season of Pukeko Pictures' animated TV series: Kiddets.

She is the author of three novels: The Graphologist's Apprentice, and the award-winning YA novels Bugs and Legacy. In 2019, Legacy won the New Zealand Children's and Young Adult Book Award for YA fiction.
She is also co-editor, with Witi Ihimaera, of an anthology of Māori myths — Pūrākau — published in 2019.

Whiti's latest novel, Kurangaituku, retells the story of Hatupatu, from the ogress bird woman's point of view.