Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall
Kōtuku is interested in developing a methodology to support Indigenous authors emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually while they work.
Commenced 2022
Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, W̱SÁNEĆ) completed her MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2020. Her manuscript Tauhou won the 2020 Adam Foundation Prize and was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in November 2022. It is set to be published by House of Anansi Press in Canada/North America in April 2023.
Kōtuku is using Athabascan scholar Dian Million's 'Felt Theory' to read and write contemporary Indigenous literatures. She wants to sift through Indigenous narratives for their experiential truths, examining the interplay of Native experience and different literary forms. She would like to investigate whether it is possible to establish a creative writing framework based on this use of felt theory, alongside kaupapa Māori and other Indigenous methodologies, which could offer relief to Indigenous students and academics in fields like creative writing, who may experience alienation or re-traumatisation.
For her creative component, Kōtuku is writing a novel in which she hopes to juxtapose these experiential truths with overt fictions—avoiding literary realism in favour of experimenting with the speculative, science fiction, horror, gothic, crime, and the surreal—in order to create tension, confusion, and feelings of displacement that mirror Indigenous postcolonial experience. The novel is separated into three sections, each following a different generation navigating the fallout of a race-based human experiment.
Read more:
Pre-order Tauhou in Aotearoa from Te Herenga Waka University Press
Pre-order the North American edition