Is Home a place or a state of mind? 2024 Waikato University Writer in Residence Ben Brown shares work and thoughts on the theme of `Home'.

Is Home a place or a state of mind? Ben shares his work and thoughts on the theme of ‘Home’.

This is the idea that everyone’s sense of what and where ‘Home’ is really begins with the stories they grow up with, from the very first utterances they can recall, kind of morphing into a reflection on a writer’s life, ultimately until, for Ben, what brings him back here to Waikato.

​Award-winning children’s author, poet and writer, Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Ngāti Paoa), is the Kaipukahu University of Waikato Writer in Residence for 2024. He’s writing his first novel Kaore Au E Mate Rānei – Neither Shall I Die, a novel disguised as a non-fiction biography that’s been on his mind for years and about reconnecting with his people, te reo Māori and whakapapa.

​Ben began writing children’s books in 1992, often collaborating with his former wife, the illustrator Helen Taylor. The pair published more than 15 books, including Ngā Raukura Rima Tekau M ā Rima (2005), A Fish in the Swim of the World (2006), Between the Kindling and the Blaze: Reflections on the Concept of Mana (2013), and A Booming in the Night (2006), which won the Best Picture Book award in the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2006.

In 2009, Ben was the writer in residence at Hagley College, Christchurch, and was awarded the Māori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in 2011. In 2021 Brown was named New Zealand’s first Te Awhi Rito Reading Ambassador.

This event is sponsored by Waikato Writers (local branch of New Zealand Society of Authors). 

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