Friday 11 September 2026

Award-winning writer Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore) has been named the 2026 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow, giving her the opportunity to live and write in Menton, southern France, for three months.

One of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prestigious and long-running literary awards, the Fellowship provides a $43,000 grant to support travel, insurance, living and accommodation costs. During her residency, Tina will have access to a writing room beneath the terrace of Villa Isola Bella, where Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote in 1919 and 1920.

Tina says receiving the Fellowship has already had a profound impact on what comes next in her writing.

“Receiving this Fellowship has already had a deep impact on my next project. It allows me to step away from my teaching job, and Menton has already given me some astonishing moments of creative energy and synchronicity, even though I haven’t set foot there yet.

“I am equal parts stunned, grateful, scared and hopeful about what this trip will bring and the writing it will generate. I’m deeply thankful for the way funding like this creates the opportunity to generate new work.”

Geraldine Baumann, Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship Advisory Committee, says the Fellowship offers writers something increasingly valuable: dedicated time and space to create.

“Tina is an exceptional writer whose work moves confidently between fiction and nonfiction, with a distinctive voice, deep curiosity and an extraordinary ability to connect with readers.

“The Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship offers something increasingly rare for writers – dedicated time and space to immerse themselves fully in their work. We’re delighted to offer Tina that opportunity, and excited by what the experience of living and writing in Menton might unlock in this next chapter of her practice.”

Tina’s personal essay collection, This Compulsion in Us, won the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards General Nonfiction Award. Her third novel, The Mires, was shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in 2025.

She is also the author of The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings and Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa. Her essay Lumpectomy won the Landfall Essay Competition in 2022, while her short story Black Milk won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the Pacific region in 2016.

Tina also co-edited Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology celebrating Māori and Pasifika writing, with Witi Ihimaera – a 1999 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow and 2026 Arts Foundation Icon Whakamana Hiranga.

Tina currently teaches a Master of Arts in Creative Writing workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

About the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship

Established in 1970, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship is one of New Zealand’s most prestigious and long-running literary awards. It offers a New Zealand writer the opportunity to live and work for three months or more in Menton, southern France, supported by a grant of $43,000 to cover travel, insurance, living and accommodation costs.

During their residency, a room beneath the terrace of Villa Isola Bella is available for use as a study. Katherine Mansfield spent long periods there in 1919 and 1920 after she contracted tuberculosis, with the climate thought to be beneficial to her health.

The Fellowship is open to writers across all genres – fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, children’s literature, and playwriting – and is the only privately funded international literary fellowship in Aotearoa. It is managed by The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi with the support of an Advisory Committee that includes members of the Winn-Manson Menton Trust.

Previous recipients include Fiona Samuel Selina Tusitala Marsh, Charlotte Grimshaw, Sue Wootton, Paula Morris, Carl Nixon, Kate Camp, Anna Jackson, Mandy Hager, Greg McGee, Chris Price, Dame Fiona Kidman, Witi Ihimaera, Elizabeth Knox, Lloyd Jones, Roger Hall, Marilyn Duckworth, Michael King and Allen Curnow.

www.thearts.co.nz/awards/katherine-mansfield-menton-fellowship