This Compulsion in Us

‘Writing is an act of defiance and bravery. Tina has the courage to write what scares her, to put it all out there, carefully, eloquently, and by doing this she makes sense of so much: a sharply unconventional upbringing, her reconnecting with her Māori mother and beloved grandmother at sixteen, and her life as a young mother living overseas. A skilled, poignant and compelling read.’—Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku

‘This is such an important book. Beautiful. Completely compassionate, utterly necessary.’ —Ingrid Horrocks

‘This book opens up the world—the gritty, hungry, paradoxical world. Like the best essayists do, Tina opens her world to us in the most personal of ways, then out and out again so that your view is much much bigger than when you began.’ —Tusiata Avia

Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) is a prizewinning writer and teacher of creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

Her novels include:

• Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings
• The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke
• The Mires, shortlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

She co-edited Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing, with Witi Ihimaera.

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.

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