BIG WORLDS IN SHORT
Tina Makereti + Joseph Trinidad
Hear from 2026 Ockham New Zealand General Non-Fiction Book Award winner Tina Makereti and 2023 Adam Prize winner Joseph Trinidad as they unveil the lives of their ancestors in order to understand themselves. Chaired by Sylvan Thomson.
From the macro to the micro, this session explores how short creative non-fiction can shine the light on who we are and our place in the world; how understanding our own family can lead to self-understanding. In her first book of non-fiction, prizewinning author Tina Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and into a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment. This Compulsion in Us is a collection of frank and moving essays about the wāhine who have show many ways of being a Māori woman, the pan and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism.
In his debut essay collection, Lucky Creatures, award-winning Filipino-Kiwi essayist Joseph Trinidad explores the lessons of his grandmother’s chicken farm and his grandfather’s lucky golden fish; the vibrancy of his home country and its rites of passage such as tuli, beauty pageants and national Boy Scout jamborees; the contradictions of Aotearoa, which welcomes his family’s labour but insists they leave their mother tongues at the border; and his own journey of coming out, along with the hard work of actualisation that follows as he and his partner grapple with the desire to have a baby.
Tina Makereti
Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) is the author of three acclaimed novels: Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings, The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, and most recently The Mires. Her collection of essays, This Compulsion In Us, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2025 and won the General Non-Fiction Award at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2022, her essay ‘Lumpectomy’ won the Landfall Essay Prize, and in 2016, her short story ‘Black Milk’ won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the Pacific Region. Her first novel won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction, also won by her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, in 2011. With Witi Ihimaera, she edited Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing.
Joseph Trinidad
Joseph Trinidad is a Filipino writer in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara. He is the winner of the 2023 Adam Foundation Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters and the inaugural Sarabande Prize in the Essay, selected by Alexander Chee. His writing appears in Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, The Spinoff, and elsewhere. His debut essay collection, Lucky Creatures, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in Aotearoa and Sarabande Books in the US.
Sylvan Thomson
Sylvan Thomson is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. He has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan. His fiction and essays have been published in New Zealand and the USA and his work can be found in Sport, Metro Magazine, The New Zealand Review of Books, Best New Zealand Non-Fiction, and A Public Space (USA), among others. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML at Victoria University and an MFA from the University of Michigan. In 2020 he was awarded the Todd New Writer’s Bursary. Alongside Grant Smithies, he is the shortlisting judge of English language entries to the 2026 Te Tauihu Short Story Awards.
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