Tania Roxborogh
“When Charlie Tangaroa and the Creature from the Sea was named Margaret Mahy Book of the Year, it felt electric…
I knew and loved Margaret Mahy and I really wanted to win – for me and for my publisher Huia – but I didn’t think I would. When it was announced at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, I walked up to accept and I could almost hear my characters, Charlie and Robbie, celebrating with me. ‘Told ya,’ Charlie would have said and Robbie, well he would have been giving his reckons about how I should spend the prize money!
As Neil Gaiman says, to write a book ‘you put one word after another until it’s done, it’s that easy and that hard.’ Writing, planning and revising takes a lot of work – and emotional input. My writing work has to mix in with everything else. I teach fulltime and right now I’ve got a new puppy to look after, I’m writing the second Charlie Tangaroa book, as well as another book which is an off-shoot of my Banquo trilogy, I’ve got three rooms of junk to sort out, and I’m studying toward my Masters in Māori Studies, looking at the way imagery from the natural world is used to describe human nature in both Shakespeare and in whakataukī. During this recent lockdown, I was on a Zoom with my Year 10 class. I shared my screen to show them how I would edit a particular sentence in an exercise we were going through.
‘It’s boring!’ said one of the students.
‘Yes!’ I said, ‘writing is boring, hard work.’
‘You make it look easy,’ said another.
‘But I helped her find the words,’ said the first student ‘she couldn’t think of Maine Coon!’
I’ve written 30 books over the last 20 years and rights in many have reverted to me. When the publisher of The Ring, Runaway and Grit closed its doors, teachers came to me asking how they could get their hands on those titles – these books are high-interest texts and are especially good for engaging reluctant teenage readers. So, with these and many others too, I go directly to the printer to fill school orders and I sell small amounts myself, 10 here, 30 there.
It’s very important to me that when people want to use one of my books, and it is no longer available through the publisher, they ask my permission. Writing is hard work and authors have a right to be paid for it. While there are times when it feels like the right thing to do to allow a school to print one of my books themselves, that decision is mine. We wouldn’t have books if it weren’t for creatives.
The night Charlie Tangaroa won, NZCYA judges Alan Dingley and Stephen Clothier talked about the importance of local writing. They described books as both windows that show the world and mirrors that reflect who we are. I wrote about this recently for The Sapling, the ways stories help us understand the world and why I weave te reo Māori into my English teaching. There I said, ‘our kōrero, the codes and conventions of how we communicate these, the imagery tied to land and sea, anchor us, and anchor our children to their world’. I think this also speaks to why books about Aotearoa, books in te reo Māori, and books that engage with our kōrero are vital.”
Tania Roxborogh is the author of more than 30 books including the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2021 Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Charlie Tangaroa and the Creature from the Sea