Briar Grace-Smith
Ngā Puhi & Ngāti Wai
2000 Laureate
Writer
Briar Grace-Smith is an award-winning writer of plays, scripts and short stories.
Her first major play Nga Pou Wahine earned her the 1995 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award. Purapurawhetu won Best New Zealand Play at the 1997 Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards. Her work has been performed at festivals and conferences in Ireland and Sydney.
Since receiving her Laureate Award Briar has toured Purapurawhetu in Canada and Greece, premiered her new play When Sun and Moon Collide in Wellington; judged the Huia Māori writers' competition for best screenplay; seen her first television play In a Fish Skin Suit premiere on prime time on TV3 and was a finalist for the Prize in Modern Letters announced early in 2002. Potiki's Memory of Stone premiered at the Court Theatre in 2003 and she was the writer in residence at Victoria University that same year.
Briar participated in 'On the Bus: Flat Out Brown Contemporary Māori Writers on Tour' Taupo 9 – 13 February 2004.
Her short story Te Manawa appeared in The Six Pack, a sampler of New Zealand writing from New Zealand's inaugral Book Month publication (2006). In the same year Briar's script The Strength of Water was selected for the Sundance screen writers laboratory in Utah. The Screenwriters Laboratory provided an opportunity for development of her script with the guidance of screenwriters who embraced Briar's vision and helped her find the most compelling way to tell her story.
The Strength of Water a story about twin children living on a Northland chicken farm, has been shot around the Hokianga and is being made into a film due for completion midway through 2008.
Briar lives with her husband and children on the Kapiti Coast, north of Wellington.
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