Dr. Emma Wehipeihana

Dr. Emma Wehipeihana (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and political commentator. Her podcast on Māori health equity, Getting Better: A Year in the Life of a Māori Medical Student (RNZ/Bird of Paradise Productions), won the Voyager Best Narrative Podcast of the Year in 2021. In 2020, she won the Opinion Writer of the Year at the Voyager media awards, and her work has featured at newsroom.co.nz, stuff.co.nz, the Guardian, the NZ Herald and in academic and literary journals and books. Wehipeihana lives in Auckland, where she works at Middlemore Hospital as a surgical registrar. The memoir, There’s a Cure for This, published by Penguin Random House in 2023, is her first book.

We are thrilled to have Emma judging the Short Non-Fiction in English category.