Marama Salsano
Marama investigated Indigenous multigenre and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki creativity.
PhD awarded 2025
Marama Salsano’s interest in Indigenous storytelling was shaped by her māmā’s early reading and writing encouragement, as well as narratives and kōrero from her Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, and Ngāti Wairere (Ngāti Huakatoa) iwi.
Marama spent four weeks in Canada at an Indigenous visual arts residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and in 2024 she co-edited To Feel The Earth as One's Skin: An Anthology of Indigenous Visual Poetry (Poem Atlas) with Lara Felsing and Astra Papachristodoulou, who she met at Banff.
Marama is an award-winning zine maker whose love for zines reflects her desire for mana motuhake publishing! Her fiction has been longlisted for the Commonwealth short story competition, highly commended in the Sargeson Prize, and on multiple occasions she has been a finalist or winner in the Pikihuia Awards for Māori writers.
In 2011 Marama completed an MA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, and ten years later she completed an MA in Tikanga Māori / Māori Cultural Studies at the University of Waikato.
Working across the broad fields of Māori and Indigenous Literary Studies, Toi Māori and Iwi Rangahau and Poetics, Marama’s critical writing, fiction and poetry has been published in various Huia Short Stories anthologies, in An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific, and in journals such as The New Zealand Journal of Literature, Waka Kuaka: The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Quick Brown Dog, Turbine, Literature Compass, Yellow Medicine Review and the Journal of Global Indigeneity.
In her doctoral project, Marama created space for Māori and Indigenous literary scholars to read and write a different type of creative writing thesis, which for Marama was one that reflected her life as an Indigenous wahine writer-scholar-creative who is from and located within Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Marama's project wove together critical work with fragments of fiction, poetry, toi Māori and personal reflections.
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