RiwiaBrown
- Writer
Riwia Brown, ONZM, is a Māori playwright and scriptwriter who won the Best Screenplay award for her adaptation of Alan Duff's novel Once Were Warriors. She wrote and directed teleplays Roimata and Ngā Wahine (which have also been performed on stage).
Screenography
Biography
The daughter of a Pākehā father and a Māori mother, Riwia Brown grew up "between the two worlds" — partly in Wellington, partly in Thailand, and partly in a Maori boarding school in Hawke's Bay.
Brown spent her early childhood in Wellington, with some visits to her mother's family, who were from the Bay of Plenty town of Te Kaha. While hanging out with her grandparents in Wellington, the children were encouraged to put on skits and songs. When she was nine, her mother passed away. After her father remarried, the family moved to Thailand. Brown returned to Aotearoa to attend St Joseph Māori Girls College, then spent three years working in London.
Awards
2001 New Zealand Order of Merit
For services to theatre and film
2021 New Zealand Television Awards
Best Script - Drama (shared with Kathryn Burnett): for The Tender Trap
“You can get big-headed . . . but you don’t get there on your own. You are part of a continuum. I owe a debt to the people who went before me like Jim Moriarty, Don Selwyn and Rangimoana, my brother.”
More information
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