Paula Witaka



She was “adopted as a baby and brought up in a Pakeha/Māori home. She hated high school and dropped out. She has travelled a lot around New Zealand. She states: “I met heaps of interesting people. I think my life has been a pretty interesting one and I like telling stories and hearing them. If ten people experience the same event, there will be ten unique life stories to tell. She has been writing for a couple of years, mostly poetry”.

Biographical sources

  • Huia Short Stories 1995. Wellington, N.Z.: Huia, 1995. 136.

    Fiction

  • "My First Client." Huia Short Stories 1995. Wellington, N.Z.: Huia, 1995. 77-83.
  • The narrator recalls her first customer in her work in a brothel and describes the inner process of depersonalising the sexual encounter and separating herself emotionally from the client by contemplating her rent being paid. A finalist in the Huia Publishers’ Māori Writers short story competitions of 1995.