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Piwaiwaka Press

We are a boutique publisher who value local writers, artists, printers, and bookshops.

05/01/2026

Our new look website is up and running. We've included a new menu to help with navigation, categories to help you find the genre you want quickly, and categories in the shop. We will be adding more in the next couple of weeks. Check it out:
www.piwaiwakapress.com

27/12/2025

Lil is a failure. A fait accompli of failure. She has failed in family, relationships, fashion, style, and employment. If failure were a skill, she would be a triumph. But it isn't, and she isn't - she's just a failure.

Her dream of art and the artist's life has diminished and her hope of eternal love, romance and a perfect relationship has faded. Now in her late thirties, with, she feels, no marketable skills or discernable talents, teaching English is all she has. She could give an artist's impression of a good job but couldn't get one if her life depended upon it, and now she's beginning to feel it may well do.

She can't understand how she's a supporting actor in the movie of her own life and needs to do something with her life before life does something to her.

A light-hearted novel with bite Learn by Mosaic is a relatable read which will resonate and stay with the reader long after they have finished the final page.

Title: Learn by Mosaic
Author: Affie Blake
ISBN: 978-1-7385926-5-4

23/12/2025

Philip Martin wanted a book about bicycles to read to the kids in his class, and he wanted a book which didn't just have the normal two-wheeled bikes, he wanted a book with tandems and unicycles and recumbent bikes and electric bikes. He couldn't find one, so he wrote one instead and local teenage artist, Isabella Adie, carefully drew the images.

Being a teacher, Philip wanted realistic looking pictures with a diverse range of riders, so Isabella drew a toddler on a tricycle, teenagers on tandems, and even a greying balding elderly man on a penny-farthing.

Title: Learning is Like Riding a Bicycle
Author: Philip Martin
Illustrator: Isabella Adie
ISBN: 978-1-0670286-3-3

21/12/2025

We're often asked: "What is autofiction?"

Autofiction is a literary genre that blends elements of autobiography and fiction. It is sometimes also called fictionalised autobiography. It allows the writer to use real-life experiences as source material while still playing with language and using the narrative techniques of fiction writing.

While the term has been around since the seventies (French author Serge Doubrovsky used it to describe his novel Fils in 1977) it's not terribly well-known, but we think it describes the genre perfectly. Autofiction is not memoir, not autobiography, it reads like fiction, feels like fiction, flows like fiction.

Doubrovsky said it's "fiction, of events and facts strictly real". Helen Mae Innes describes it differently, saying at the beginning of Into the Woods "this is my memoir from an alternate reality". Although the events and facts in her book are fictionalised the feelings and reactions are not.
We've published three books considered to be autofiction: Helen Mae Innes' Into the Woods, and Stevan Eldred-Grigg's books Green Grey Rain and Not Swinging, Swooning.

Into the Woods: The healing power of birds
Author: Helen Mae Innes
ISBN: 978-0-473-67044-3

17/12/2025

The artwork for the cover of The Unused Life of Tito López before the text was added. The artwork by Sosa Sosaenol was used for a gay love story by Luis Luna. Sosa been a logo designer and illustrator since 2009. He's from Yogyakarta in Indonesia and currently works as a freelance T-shirt designer, logo designer, and illustrator.

The story follows a clever, hopeful, young graduate, Tito López, as he starts adulthood as well as the whole new millennium. He lives in a provincial Mexican city at the turn of the 21st century and he wants what most of us want … a career, love, happiness. But will he find any of them on Cerro del Calvario?

What’s up with his nunnish clever sister Angelita? Will the deer’s eye work – the amulet given by the wrinkled family workhorse, María? Who’s the mysterious blond god, Salvador?

The Unused Life of Tito López portrays the Lopez family in a way that will seem familiar to those from middle-class suburban families almost anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile, readers from outside Mexico will be intrigued by the sense of other, parallel, exotic, existences in our contemporary world.

Title: The Unused Life of Tito López
Author: Luis Luna
ISBN: 978-1-7385926-4-7

14/12/2025

Detail showing a couple of cheeky pūkeko (swamphens) from one of the pictures in Learning is Like Riding a Bicycle. Philip Martin's book is illustrated by high-school-aged Isabella Adie.

10/12/2025

Rain on iron rooftops. A radio streaming the latest hit songs. It's the early 1950s. The baby boom. Valarie is a talkative, singing, slanging, pregnant daughter of the slums. Gilbert, her husband, is a well-spoken son of a landed family. They already have three kids. Gilbert has just taken a job as paymaster at a coal mine. The family is about to start life in a green and black and red township on the West Coast.
A little boy is born, almost in a taxi, and named Stevan.

Green Grey rain tells the story of the first years of a little boy dreaming and singing, wondering and wishing, in the bush, rain, rust and sooty streets of 1950s Blackball. A story told by the boy. A story told too by the hit songs he hears on the radio. And a story told by his mother - someone who, with her sister, has already spoken to us in the pages of Oracles and Miracles.

Title: Green Grey Rain
Author: Stevan Eldred-Grigg
Cover photography: Tobias Tullius
ISBN: 978-0-473-57151-1

08/12/2025

Warblish is not (yet) a well-known term, but the thing it represents has been found in languages and cultures all over the world—it's when we mishear, intentionally or mistakenly, birdsong as human language. The resulting phrases can be humourous, contain identifying information, or tell a tiny story. This article from the bird magazine Audubon includes reference to Helen Mae Innes' latest book Warblish, Chirpish, Ticktocklish, & Animalopoeia. Hers is the first book to tackle this area of research so thoroughly and includes a comprehensive list of over 1500 examples from more than 50 languages.

Title: Warblish, Chirpish, Ticktocklish, & Animalopoeia
Author: Helen Mae Innes
ISBN: 978-1-0670286-7-1

07/12/2025

Detail from the back cover of Into the Woods: The healing power of birds. Helen Mae Innes wrote this book about recovering from the grief of losing a baby by reconnecting with nature, especially through watching and listening to New Zealand birds. The back cover has this image by Wellingtonian artist Tama McArdell of a woman and a tūī (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae) who also painted a watercolour of a ruru/morepork for the front cover. More of Tama's images can be found at www.blogger.com under his name.

Title: Into the Woods: The healing power of birds
Author: Helen Mae Innes
Cover Artist: Tama McArdell
ISBN: 978-0-473-67044-3

04/12/2025

Kids who love all things to do with bicycles will love this fun rhyming story about wheels. Great for adults and children to read together or for early readers. Includes topics of building resilience, counting, and noticing similarities that can be expanded upon in conversation. The dyslexia-friendly font makes the story accessible to all readers.

Author: Madden Hay
Illustrator: Alan Benge
Publisher: Piwaiwaka Press
ISBN: 978-1-0670286-6-4

02/12/2025

"Stevan-Eldred Grigg has an eye for social mores and habits of love and family. A super story about rashly setting off on a mid-life adventure in a totally new culture. For Pru and Guy, things might never be the same again." Tina Shaw

01/12/2025

Pru has been married to Guy for a quarter of a century. She hasn’t had s*x for ten years. ‘Why the hell do I live my life this way?’ she says to herself. ‘I mean – really!’ Change comes from out of the blue when odd old Uncle Bertie dies in Samoa and leaves his property to Guy. On a whim, the couple decide to go and take a look at what they know must be a tropical paradise. Not their usual stamping ground, you understand. Daringly, they fly to Apia. Pru soon finds herself thinking things, feeling things, doing things she’s never till now come close to thinking, feeling, doing.
‘Are we just an ornamental waste of space, d’you think?’ she asks Guy in Samoa.
‘I rather think we are, darling.’
‘Oh dear.’
Pru Goes Troppo is a comic novel about the ups and downs of two people who are privileged parasites, yet curiously innocent. Among the themes explored in the story are class, gender, colonialism and neo-colonialism, ageing and belonging. And pratfalls.

Formats: e-book; paperback
Author: Stevan Eldred-Grigg
Cover Artist: Sandra Thomson

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