This Compulsion in Us (B Format)

Winner of the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for General Non-Fiction

Tina Makereti stands at the foot of her mounga and pays careful attention to tohu. With her tūpuna at her elbow she casts around for home, meets taonga in museums, and writes her way towards her father. She walks through the darkness with others, in awe of Te Kore, Te Pō and Te Ao Mārama—a universe of potential being, dark and light. 

In these frank and moving essays, Makereti explores her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment. From the wāhine who have shown her ways of being, to the experience of living with an alcoholic, undergoing breast cancer treatment and recognising how art returns power to survivors of colonialism, she asks—

What if we could transform the events that made us who we are? 

What if there were a way back to the beginning? 

‘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 prize-winning 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, and 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.

Cover image: Tā moko: Hinerewa Crofts, Hinerewa Tā Moko Studio, Otautahi; photograph: Ebony Lamb