J. Wiremu Kane
Ngāpuhi - Ngāti Toro, Ngāti Manu, Te Mahurehure
J. Wiremu Kane lives and writes on the ancestral lands of Ngāti Hei and Ngāti Manu. He has been published in Landfall NZ, Middle Distance, Huia 14 and the New Zealand Listener. He was the 2022 Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at the IIML. Through his writing, he aims to expose the still gaping wound colonisation has wrought on this whenua and its people.
J. Wiremu is hoping to get his novel manuscript up to a publishable standard, originally written for his creative writing thesis in 2019. When he was writing this manuscript, he had no Māori input or guidance, so is extremely excited to have a Māori mentor to help with the tricky line of a fictional magical culture, with roots in Te Ao Māori.
About J. Wiremu’s book
King’s Crossing is a contemporary fantasy, where our hero Tama-toa Lenoir is a successful magic entrepreneur, who on his return to Aotearoa, is persuaded to take up a teaching post at his old school, Ahuahu Miharo. When Tama finds the body of a mysterious young man, his life is thrown into chaos, and secrets and memories he had long kept hidden come to light.