Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) was born in Nelson in 1982, raised in Waimangaroa and has returned there to live with her family. She worked as a reporter for The News in Westport.

Becky’s short story ‘Abalone’ was long-listed for the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, her essay ‘Mothers Day’ has been selected for the Landfall anthology Strong Words.

Auē is her first novel & it won both the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and the Hubert Church Prize for best first book of fiction at the 2020 Ockham Book Awards.