Tina says receiving the fellowship has already had a profound impact on what comes next in her career.
“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.”
Professor Damien Wilkins, director of the IIML at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, congratulates Tina on her achievement, saying, “This award comes at a perfect time for this important writer to sound some new notes and add to her significant body of work.”
The fellowship comes with a $50,000 grant to support travel, insurance, living, and accommodation costs. 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. We are 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.
More information about the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship can be found here.