Small acts of defiance: tradition and reinvention in Indigenous short stories Contemporary short stories in English by Indigenous writers operate within the tension between past and the present, rural and urban, the community and the individual, ancient and modern belief systems. From subject matter to style, from setting to idiom, these stories defy expectations of what constitutes tradition – in their local cultural context as well as in the Western short story form – and challenge Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike to understand the complexities and confluences of sources.

Friday, June 20, 2025 - 1:30 - 3:00 pm

In this plenary session, four Māori short story writers from Aotearoa New Zealand discuss their own work, and that of other Indigenous story writers around the world, within the context of colonisation, international influence and cultural inheritance and reinvention.

Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu) is a writer living and working in Taranaki. Her first book, Ruin, was published in 2023 with Te Herenga Waka University Press and won the Hubert Church Best First Book of fiction at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her fiction and non-fiction writing can be found in Headland, The Listener, Metro, Newsroom, The Spinoff, and Pantograph Punch. She has an MA with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters. She was the recipient of a 2024 Arts Foundation Springboard Award. In 2023 she was awarded the Michael King International Residency at Varuna House, Australia. She was the recipient of the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary in 2021. Emma is part of Te Hā Taranaki, a collective for Māori writers, established in 2019. She is currently working on a novel.