A collection of stories about Māori gods and legends has cleaned up at the 2022 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
Gavin Bishop’s book Atua won three of the top six awards, and he’s taken out book of the year for the fifth time now.
“I would describe it as a taonga, it’s a real treasure for every home in New Zealand,” says one of the award judges, Laura Caygill.
The Māori stories of creation, epic voyaging and heroic deeds have been told for generations but never written in this way for tamariki.
Bishop describes them as “magical” and says, “they were supposedly answers to questions people thousands of years ago had about their existence. They weren’t meant for children. They deal with issues like incest and rape and murder. I had to find ways of telling those stories without making them offensive”.
From his hand painted illustrations, and dozens of bit sized fun facts, to getting the narrative right, it took two years to produce what he says is perhaps his best work yet.
“I compared some of stories I found that had been retold by say Tainui people were quite different to Ngātahi people. I had to steer a kind of pathway through all of these stories, simplify them, that was my challenge as a children’s writer,” says Bishop.
He’s written and illustrated more than 60 books in his 41-year long career, and indigenous stories have been his focus.
“Stories about New Zealand are so important to young kids. If you see yourself reflected in a story maybe you might think that you can tell your own story one day too and hopefully that way we’re breeding the next generation of writers and illustrators,” says Caygill who hails the book as one of incredibly high impact for this generation and the next.
“I want our children to be able to read about themselves and their own world and about their stories… I just find it’s sort of something I have to do, I can’t stop.”
More tales of Aotearoa are yet to be told, through his words and his art.
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