Each Kāpiti Writers’ Retreat we strive to bring together a teaching team that captures the feel of the contemporary New Zealand literary landscape. Below is information about the teaching writers for 2024.
See Morning Workshops & Afternoon Sessions for what our writers will be teaching. You can learn more about the teaching writers through our 5 Quick Questions series.
Morning workshops
Each of our writers will be teaching a 7-hour workshop across Saturday and Sunday mornings on a variety of topics – world-building, series, poetry, eco-fiction, zines, and fiction. Find out more about their morning workshops.
Cassie Hart
Worldbuilding Wonders: Create Your Own Universes
Cassie Hart is an award-winning Māori (Kāi Tahu) author of speculative fiction. Her literary career boasts a rich portfolio comprising more than ten novels and novellas, many of which have garnered acclaim. Her stories have graced the pages of numerous anthologies, and her editorial skills have seen her edit half a dozen anthologies as well.
Cassie’s life is intertwined with her family and an assortment of animals under the guardianship of Taranaki Maunga, where she continues crafting imaginative worlds.
Ingrid Horrocks
Essays in the Space Between
Ingrid’s creative publications span two decades and a number of genres, including two poetry books, two books of narrative nonfiction/travel writing, and an edited collection on imaginings of place in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her writing increasingly has an ecological focus, culminating in her most recent book, Where We Swim, which is part memoir, part essay, part nature writing. It was published in Aotearoa and Australia in 2021.
Her writing has been described as ‘exquisitely written’, ‘luminous’ work ‘that makes you think about what kind of world we live in’. Other publications include work in Lithub and the Ninth Letter (US), the Guardian, and Sydney Review of Books, where she was an Aotearoa-New Zealand Consulting Editor. Ingrid grew up on a farm near Masterton, did a PhD in Literature at Princeton, where she also studied creative writing, and was until recently a Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University. She lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and is currently working on a collection of interlinked short stories, Nine Lives, with the support of a CNZ grant. In 2024 she will be the International Institute of Modern Letters Writer in Residence Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington.
Isa Pearl Ritchie
Designing and promoting a compelling series
Isa Pearl Ritchie is a full-time writer with a strong readership in the US and UK. Her bestselling books have sold over 100,000 copies. Isa has been writing novels under a handful of pen names for almost twenty years and has published over twenty books across multiple genres in this time. She currently writes cosy witchy fantasy books which she very much enjoys. Isa is a former public servant and recovering academic with a Masters in sociology and PhD in social science. Her novel Fishing for Māui was named one of the best books of 2018 in the Listener and was shortlisted for the Booklovers award in 2019. She grew up in the Waikato in a bicultural family, and currently lives in Wellington.
Kiri Piahana-Wong
Grief and loss: writing through the hard times
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet and editor, and she is the publisher at Anahera Press. Kiri’s poetry has appeared in over forty journals and anthologies, including Essential NZ Poems, Landfall, Poetry NZ, Puna Wai Kōrero, Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation, A Treasury of NZ Poems for Children, Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems, Vā: Stories by Women of the Moana, and more. She has one full-length collection, Night Swimming, and a second, Tidelines, is forthcoming. Kiri also works with poetry and fiction as a book reviewer, manuscript assessor, anthology editor, NZSA mentor, and project manager. Her most recent publication is Te Awa o Kupu, one of two anthologies of contemporary Māori writing, co-edited with Vaughan Rapatahana and Witi Ihimaera. Kiri lives in Whanganui with her family.
Paula Morris
Troubleshooting fiction
Paula Morris MNZM (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whātua) is an award-winning novelist, story writer and essayist from Auckland. Her books include the novel Rangatira (Penguin 2011); False River (Penguin, 2017), a collection of essays and stories; and Shining Land (Massey University Press, 2020), a collaboration with photographer Haru Sameshima about the writer Robin Hyde. She is the editor of the Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories (Auckland University Press, 2023) and a co-editor (with Alison Wong) of A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2021).
Paula is an associate professor at the University of Auckland, where she is the director of the Master of Creative Writing. She has mentored writers through the NZSA and the Te Papa Tupu Māori Writers Incubator, and also teaches writing at festivals, schools, universities, and community programmes in New Zealand and overseas. Paula has been awarded numerous international residencies, and in 2019 was the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow. She edits the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books, and is the founder of the Academy of NZ Literature and Wharerangi, the online Māori literature hub.
Sasha Francis
Steal and break the (literary) rules
Sasha Francis is a Pākehā writer, artist, community activist, and publisher with 5ever books, based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She mostly writes experimental philosophy and poetry, and has won awards for her zines, ‘Blood Notes’ (poetry) and ‘CRISIS’ (collage essay). In 2018, she completed a Masters thesis in Sociology at VUW, examining the question of how we might sustain our emotional commitment to utopia, with specific grounding in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. In 2019, she worked for Bridget Williams Books as the marketing and events manager. In 2020, she and Achille Segard launched 5ever books, an independent publishing house running out of Rebel Press that dabbles in performance art, art workshops, community organising, public talks and related activism as well as regular book and zine related things. Sasha is a prolific maker, loves cooking for her friends and is very passionate about underground and subversive creative cultures.
Personalised coaching
Want help clarifying an idea? Feedback on a short writing sample? Practical tips for structuring your plot, developing your voice and characters, or setting—and meeting—your writing goals? Author and writing coach, Catherine Cooper is offering free 45-minute sessions for prose writers working on or contemplating a book-length work of fiction, nonfiction, or memoir. Limited places. Book your session when you register for the Retreat.
Catherine Cooper
Catherine Cooper is an author and writing coach from Nova Scotia, Canada. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montréal, and she has published four books—a short story collection, a co-authored children’s picture book, and two novels. Her first novel, White Elephant, was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Alberta Book Publishers’ Book of the Year Award. Her second novel, Lásko, was published by Freehand Books in September, 2023.
Freewriting and morning yoga
Leading the Friday evening freewriting session and Saturday and Sunday morning yoga is Helen Lehndorf.
Helen Lehndorf
Author and teacher Helen Lenhdorf’s latest book ‘A Forager’s Life’ is a creative nonfiction nature memoir. It made the top ten list for NZ nonfiction for several weeks in 2023. Helen has published essays, reviews, and poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Spin-off, Pantograph Punch, and Landfall. She is also the author of the poetry collection ‘The Comforter’, which made The Listener’s 100 Best Books list in the year of release, and ‘Write to the Centre’, a book about the joy of keeping a journal.
Notebooks for Prisoners
A notebook making session will be hosted by Sasha Francis, Achille Segard and Renae Williams from 5ever Books.
The 5ever books community supports incarcerated people through their Notebooks for Prisoners campaign. They repurpose waste paper into blank notebooks with the help of friends. These notebooks are put together by volunteers, delivered free of charge, and then distributed ad hoc to those inside through a network of case managers, therapists, case officers, education Tutors, etc. The aim is to ensure that all inside prison have basic materials, such as blank paper. The main (and only) cost for this campaign is postage, as 10-15kg boxes are expensive!
5ever Books
5ever is an underground publishing house based at Rebel Press, Trades Hall in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They print, splice, bind and chop pesky dank little books. Their scope is nebulous. Form and sense of disciplinarity remains plural. But their target is clear: to publish punchy, intense and interdisciplinary work, woven together by a shared transformational kaupapa. They recognise the collective necessity of actively infiltrating and affecting their playground and home, Wellington. As they balance their vision with pragmatism, they are committed to realising a post-capitalist vision that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Aotearoa. They are serious in their playfulness.