Show notes
Monty Soutar is a respected New Zealand historian who took a big step and turned his life upside down to write a game changing novel. Kāwai For Such A Time As This, is the first instalment in what is to be a three book family saga, which went straight to the top of the bestseller lists in New Zealand and stayed there for 22 weeks.
Hi there, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And it’s quite likely no one else but Monty has the knowledge and understanding to undertake a book like it, in the tradition of Alex Haley’s Roots, introducing readers to pre-European Maori life in much the same way as Alex Haley’s tale of tracing his roots back to Africa captivated an international audience.
Monty tells the fascinating tale of how he came to write it and explains how all of his life experience seemed to be leading up to this point. A perfect preparation for writing a trilogy, telling a story of nation building through the eyes of its original people.
Our Giveaway for this week is Free Historical Fiction for June and Sadie’s Vow, my Book #1 in the Home At Last trilogy is included in a good range of other selections.
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Links for Monty’s Episode:
Alex Haley Roots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roots:_The_Saga_of_an_American_Family
NZ East Coast and Gisborne: https://www.newzealand.com/int/feature/auckland-to-wellington-east-coast-journey/
https://www.tairawhitigisborne.co.nz/
Whakatane: https://www.whakatane.com/
NZ Wars of 1860s: https://teara.govt.nz/en/new-zealand-wars#
Ngati Porou: https://ngatiporou.com/
Ngati Awa: https://ngatiawa.iwi.nz/
Monty Soutar Nga Tamatoa: The Price of Citizenship: C Company 28 , (Maori Battalion) 1939 – 45, in the Second World War https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5509025
Monty Soutar: Whiti Whiti Whiti, Maori in the First World War: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51092025-whitiki-whiti-whiti-e
Captain James Cook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cook
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Part: https://www.amazon.com.au/Things-Fall-apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547
Victoria Hislop, The Island: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/922991.The_Island
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant: https://www.amazon.com.au/Red-Tent-Novel-Tenth-anniversary/dp/0312427298
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: https://www.amazon.com.au/Wolf-Hall-Hilary-Mantel/dp/0312429983
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333230-the-luminaries
Patricia Grace, Tu: https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/tu-9780143019206
Witi Ihimaera: https://www.penguin.co.nz/authors/witi-ihimaera
Where to find Monty Online
Facebook: @montysoutarauthor
Booktopia: https://www.booktopia.com.au/kawai-monty-soutar/book/9781776890309.html
Amazon.com.au: https://www.amazon.com.au/K%C4%81wai-Such-Time-As-This-ebook/dp/B0BPJNP3QC/
Introducing Kāwai author Monty Soutar
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Monty. Hello there, Monty, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us
Dr Monty Soutar, respected historian and author of a new NZ historical series
Monty Soutar: Thank you, Jenny. I’m pleased to be beyond the show. Kia ora ki a koe. (Ed note: Greetings and Hello to you.)
Jenny Wheeler: Kia ora. (Hello Yes.) Now we’ve mentioned in the intro about how Roots was partly the thing that sparked this and. Alex Haley’s Roots was published way back in the late seventies when you were just a wee toddler. So how did you come to be aware of it and what sort of an impact did it have on you when you were a younger boy?
Monty Soutar: Well, no, I wasn’t a toddler. I was at secondary school when I saw the series. So I never read the book. I saw the series on television. It was one of the I think it was the biggest television series in terms of audience in New Zealand up until that time.
And what intrigued me about it was that this guy was able to track his family’s history through really some oral accounts that had been passed down through the family. And it reminded me so much of how Maori keep their records orally. And the other thing that impressed me was his own journey.
Towards the end of the series it looked at his story about how he found this information about his family and it resonated with me because I was doing that at pretty much at the same time as young as I was. I was trying to find out more about my family history and in watching the program, it was almost like it grabbed him in a way that he couldn’t let it go.
It’s almost like he was meant to do this, and I had that same feeling. I didn’t know why I was interested in history, particularly Maori history. Why in my family, there was seven in my family, brothers and sisters, but I was the one who had this passion to know who we were. Something had been planted it in me.
That’s what I found and that’s why Alex Haley’s Roots resonated with me and him particularly, in his journey.
Monty Soutar’s starting point in his writing journey
Jenny Wheeler: Great. So give us a picture of yourself at that stage. For those who aren’t so familiar with New Zealand, where in New Zealand were you? What tribal affiliations did you have? Set the picture for us a little bit.
Monty Soutar: Yes, well, everybody thinks Maori are one group of people. We’re tribal. And there’s slight differences between the tribes. Where you come from actually matters.
And I come from on my mother’s side, the East Coast of the North Island from a tribe where people known as Ngati Porou, and on my father’s side, I come from Whakatane from a tribe known as Ngati Awa, who had two entirely different experiences of colonization.
One, on my father’s side, they lost all their land as a result of the wars fought in the 1860s. And that meant that their journey post the 1860s was quite a depressing one, and had huge psychological impacts on the people, I believe.
But on my mother’s side, we retained all our land and we fought on the side of the New Zealand government or the British Crown. And so we had a much more favorable future as a result.
I was at boarding school in the late seventies – a Catholic boarding school in Fielding at the time. We were born Anglicans, but we’re pretty flexible as Maori people.
We all believe we’re praying to the same God and it was the education we were after rather than the religion. That’s where I was as a young person. I wasn’t studying history, because the priest told me it wouldn’t get me a job once I got out of school.
I never pursued it then. But I just had this innate interest in learning more about my own history and particularly Maori history.
The first in a trilogy covering 200 hundred years
Jenny Wheeler: Probably it’s good to point out that this is the first in a trilogy, so this book takes us to the point when the European “discoverers” in the form of Captain James Cook arrive in 1769.
The next two books are going to cover the much later development of the story. It’s very much a work in progress at the moment.
But the subtitle of the book is, For Such A Time As This, and it’s very much a book of its time. Talk a bit about that subtitle, it comes up in the book, but also it’s relevant to what’s happening in New Zealand right now.
Monty Soutar: Yes, it appears a number of times during the story, but right now in New Zealand, we seem to be on the cusp of change in my view.
Right now, this year, 2023, we’ve introduced into the New Zealand School Curriculum compulsory learning of New Zealand history, right through from I guess the infants through to the end of secondary school. And that’s a first, which suggests to me that attitudes have changed, where we realize knowing about our past is important.
And I think this particular book is written with a view to being introduced in the curriculum.
And that’s another reason I did it. I think that 10 years ago maybe, 15 years ago, I don’t think the country was ready to visit the past in terms of our pre-colonial history.
Nobody really wants to go there and look at the impact of colonization on the indigenous people of this country and how it shaped New Zealand.
I think that this younger generation that’s coming through, they don’t have the issues we had growing up with, I guess with our race relations, with knowing who we really are.
A ‘road to Damascus’ experience in the birthing
But you know, I do believe that to go forward you’ve got to know where you come from.
I think For Such A Time As This is right now is that time and we are ready to revisit our past and I think this novel actually opens the door to the past in a way that none other has done so far.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I do agree with you there. You tell the story of how you came to write it, almost like it’s a spiritual odyssey. It’s like ‘a road to Damascus’ encounter that you had as you were planning or thinking about it.
Can you tell us how everything that you’d been doing, perhaps up into that point in your life, grew together and created something quite new and sudden and rather challenging.
Monty Soutar: In 2019, I finished my most recent non-fiction book, which was a Nga Tamatoa, History of Maori participation in the First World War. It’s a huge book.
It took me about five years to research and write, so I was pretty almost burned out after that and decided to go on holiday with my wife. And because I’d put so much time into that I felt there was an opportunity to just to sit back and have a blow, really.
We were heading to Greece for three months to spend time with our friends. But before I left, I had an inkling that there’s something I’m supposed to do next, and it’s not non-fiction.
I was thinking about it and I thought it might be that I’m going to turn to fiction, largely because I felt that the audience through non-fiction is not as great and as well, the audience I was really interested in was young people, I felt that fiction was the way to reach them, but I just didn’t quite know what I was going to write.
I was in bed with my wife at about 4:30am, if I remember right.
I guess because I was thinking about it. I was half asleep and I heard this voice. I didn’t actually hear it, but this impression in my mind just said, ‘Get Roots.’
It was clear and I woke up about an hour and a half later and I said to my wife, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get this book, Roots.’
The voice of ‘intuition’ speaks
I knew all it said was ‘Get Roots,’ but somehow I knew and understood what that meant.
It was to get the book Roots and read it which I’d never read. As I was mentioning to you before Jenny, the Roots TV series was well known to me from the 1970s.
My wife has heard me before say that I’ve heard things and she knows enough about me to know that this is actually could be real.
I wasn’t sure, but we were heading back to Gisborne. It was a Sunday in Auckland, so there’s no bookshops open. And I said, well, the book’s so old, you probably have to go to second hand bookshop or a rare bookshop.
We’re driving back to Gisborne and we get to this little place called Paeroa, which is a little town between Auckland and Gisborne, on a Sunday when you wouldn’t expect anything to be open.
I was asleep and my wife was driving and she nudged me and she said, “Hey, look. There’s a Red Cross book sale on the side of the road,” and I looked up and sure enough, and there were these boxes of books there that were being sold and on a Sunday. It’s was pretty amazing that there was one.
We stopped and we said, ‘well, let’s have a look. Who knows, that book Roots might be here?’
They had them in alphabetical order in the boxes A- Z and I walked straight to the box that had the Rs, the books with Rs, and they’re all spine down.
You had to look at the spine to see what the title was, but in this particular box there was one book sitting on top of all the others with the cover down.
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A remarkable coincidence seals the deal
But it wasn’t spine down. The book was sitting there like it was waiting for somebody, and I turned it over and it was the Roots book by Alex Haley.
I looked at my wife, she looked at me, and we knew then that whatever I had heard, whatever this impression voice was, meant something that I was supposed to do.
I took the book to Greece and I read it, Alex Haley’s novel. And long story short, I came to the understanding in my mind that I’m supposed to write a novel like this. Roots is about six generations of a Black American family starting from their ancestor being captured in Africa and brought to America.
I felt that I was to write a saga like that, which followed a number of generations of a Maori family in order to tell the history of this country in a way that it’s never been told before.
That’s what I had come up with. I spent a bit of time in France after Greece, and we went to a resort where it was really quiet and I know from the past that if you block everything else out and you focus, you can start to hear things that you mightn’t if you’re busy with life.
After a seven day fast and a retreat, which I had learned from the Catholics when I was at boarding school, I started, well, even five days into it, I started to hear this impression again in my head.
And I wrote down what I was being told. And there were three things, three big things that I believed I had to do once I got back to New Zealand.
Three points of action required
One was to, to leave my job. I worked for the government as a historian. Two was I had to sell my house or our house, my wife and I. I understood that was to give me some income to be able to write the series that I’ve started on.
The third one was to write the series. So leave work, sell the house, write the series.
I’m that sort of person who’s, if I hadn’t seen the Roots book there, sitting on that box, I might’ve been had some doubts, but I believed that there was some sort of divine guidance that was leading me into doing this, that I was ready to do it, no questions asked, but I had to ask my wife, of course, because it was going to have an impact on her.
And I can say that she wasn’t keen, immediately, but through some things that happened I think she realized this is something that has to be done and, I’m meant to do it.
We came back to New Zealand and I followed that plan and that’s how I got to into writing the Kawai series.
Jenny Wheeler: Is she reassured that it is the right thing to do? Now that you’ve got one book out, is she on board with it now?
Monty Soutar: Yes. Definitely. I mean, what’s happened with this first book you can’t put this down to me because, I don’t have any experience in writing novels. I’ve never written fiction before. The response that I’ve had to the book, she’s seen it too.
She was my greatest critic actually, because she’s read a lot of novels.
A best seller at the top for 22 weeks
And she used to say all the way through the drafting of it. ‘This doesn’t sound like a novel. This sounds like you, a historian, writing nonfiction.’ And it used to grate at me.
But I used to measure how good the book was based on the feedback she’d give to me.
Just the things that have happened with this book and just how it’s taken off, I know you can’t put that down to me and my ability. That whatever this was that’s guiding me, this is all meant to happen and I have no doubt about that.
Jenny Wheeler: And it has sold very well, hasn’t it
Monty Soutar: Well, it went straight to number one, New Zealand fiction in the week it was launched and it stayed there for 22 weeks at number one.
I heard of some sort of a record. And I really can’t explain why people, well, such a diverse group in the population, are reading it, because it’s not one group of people.
It’s a wide range. I mean, the greatest thrill I get is people who come to me and say, ‘Look, I’ve never read a book since I left secondary school, but this book has encouraged me to read’ and I think that has to be put down that people do actually want to know something about the history of this country.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right. Now the book does tackle some difficult subjects because Maori culture had it’s wars and brutal aspects, and you’ve tackled those head on with a great deal of honesty and made it understandable, how that culture operated and the way it really hung together as a cohesive unit.
Tell us a bit about how you managed to get to that and was it hard to front up to some of those issues?
Telling a difficult, brutal story
Monty Soutar: For those who don’t know much about New Zealand, the Maori ancestors arrived here some 800 years ago from the Pacific. And they peopled the two islands, well, there’s more than two islands, but the two main islands.
As the population grew, in order to protect food resources there was a lot of fighting that went on.
And in our history, there was cannibalism, so you ate your enemies and there was polygamy. We had more than one wife or one husband.
That’s the kind of culture that was here. It was a tough existence for people, depending on where you were ranked in the tribal structure. If you were a chief, it wasn’t so bad, but if you were less than that, life was quite difficult.
But it was also, as the novel describes it a beautiful place, and when the fighting wasn’t happening, people were good to each other and they were close to nature and they had strong spiritual beliefs. So that’s the environment that existed here in this country.
I basically start this novel in the 17 hundreds, and we’re right in that environment. There are no, non-Maori here, there were just our ancestors. And I tried to describe what it was like.
The other thing about Maori people back then you had to be careful what you said.
It was easy to insult somebody. You could say something that was taken the wrong way and that would lead to sometimes the destruction of a whole tribe of people.
And with all this fighting going on, if you attack one tribe, you can be assured that they were going to attack you back.
A young boy witnesses a traumatic murder
If they weren’t going do it immediately because they didn’t have the soldiers to do it or the warriors to do it, they would wait a generation, two, three sometimes, but they would never let it lie.
Right up until the first Europeans arrived it was a lot about balancing the books. ‘We owe you for something you did to our ancestors two or three generations ago.’
That’s what I’ve really tried to do in the novel, to create that society so that it’s believable, and to get people to understand how important vengeance was to that society.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Your main character as a young boy, witnesses a massacre where his father and a lot of his close relations die, and he almost miraculously manages to escape from that scene.
But it’s obviously very traumatic for him. And then you jump to when he’s young man, 19 or 20 years old, having his first son.
And that son is dedicated to basically restoring the mana (the status, the power, the respect) of the tribe by. carrying out warfare against the people that had killed their people a generation before.
And we follow that character right through in a very touching way, so that we understand really the dilemma that a person like that faces, whether they were naturally of a warrior spirit or not.
If their position in the tribe required it, they had to fulfil that role. Now I know that it’s based on a lot of work you have done on your own genealogy, but you have not called the characters by the names of your family.
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Dedicated in the womb to vengeance
Tell us a little bit about why you made that call. You’ve slightly clouded it so people can’t just point and say, oh yes, that’s Monty’s ancestor, you’ve made it a little bit more of a mystery.
Tell us about why you made that choice.
Monty Soutar: Yes. Well, you described that really well. Chapter two is when he’s born, the protagonist for this novel and we really follow him from the womb to the tomb in this story. He’s a flawed hero.
What you come to understand in the novel is that if you train a person in to be a warrior, to know nothing else, but to that you get your way through killing, once he had achieved his purpose in life by avenging his grandfather’s death, well he’s got some problems, because he only knows how to conduct life in one way.
In terms of my own family, this is based on a true story.
That’s why it was so easy for me to tell. And people read the book and they see that you almost empathize with them even though you know you can be quite brutal at times,
Jenny Wheeler: I absolutely agree. You leave it at a real cliff hanger at the end, and I’m still hoping that something good happens for him.
Monty Soutar: Well, this child, even in the womb, he’s dedicated to the task of avenging his grandfather’s death. He’s got no choice and that’s the sad part about it, that he has no choice in life.
He either has to do this or die. And that really was what it was like for a lot of our warrior leaders back in those days, male and female, that their lives were dedicated to causes that weren’t of their making.
A very long memory for grievances
And it helps to also to explain why Maori have long memories today. The tribunal process that I’ll talk about later, the treaty settlement process shows us that people have not forgotten what happened to their ancestors 150 years ago and they bring it up and it affects their lives even today.
I think that the way I wrote it was the way I was told it.
Of course, I’ve had to grow it and embellish it in places to make a really good story. But his story is how I heard it on the marae, (meeting place.)
I heard it from my own uncles and grand uncles. To protect them, the people, I changed their names, but in such a way that my own family will know who I’m talking about.
For example, the prologue opens at a place called Nupe Pa. (Ed note: Pa was a fortified village – now a modern day marae) Now if you try to find that pa on East Coast, it doesn’t exist. But if you turn it around to Penu Pa, that’s the pa everybody knows I come from.
And I’ve done that with all the ancestors names. I’ve left enough clues in there for my own people to know who I’m talking about, because I really want them to understand this is a true story.
It involves our ancestors and but I don’t want others to, and it doesn’t really matter for others. It’s not that important who these people are.
I was thinking too, I just didn’t want people rocking up to our marae. And to some of our places that I’ve written about after the book, because I knew the book was going to take off and that’s happened before with other books and films that have been made about places on East Coast.
For Maori, colonization began with the musket
So I was conscious of that. The other reason I changed the names too, I was wanting to protect myself, because of the enemy tribes I talk about.
If they come knocking on the door and say, ‘Hey, you’re talking about us.’ I’ll be able to say, no, I’m not. Where does it say your tribal name in there?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. That’s very good thinking. Yes, that’s amazing. You end the book as I mentioned on a real cliff hanger. It’s a great way to do it actually. But that does mean that we are left really hanging to know where the next book is going to begin and when we’re going to be able to read it.
How are you going with the process of writing a trilogy?
Monty Soutar: The second book – I wrote the whole plan out and the structure for it, what’s to happen in each chapters. And I’ve written about a third of it now. I can’t say it comes easy, but it starts in in 1818, 1819. And that is the period in which muskets are in the hands of some tribes and moving around the country.
And we, who have no muskets at that period, faced the onslaught of that and the impact of it. It jumps probably what’s that 40 years or so from the first story, but you get to learn what happened at the end of that other one, not, I don’t want to give it away.
But we learn what happened then and then we’ll follow it through. And it goes through to about 1850 – so its about a 30 year period that this next book covers.
As I did with the first book, every scene has embedded in it some something of the tikanga – the customs of Maori life back then.
And so you see it, even with the beginning of colonization, which really colonization for us, began with the musket.
The first Maori European encounter – like a mirage
Jenny Wheeler: Now you did do a massive work, which has never seen the light of day. You transcribed your family’s oral history and that’s been tucked away and kept secret for your family.
But towards the end of this book, they do have an encounter with European sailors who they hardly even understand are other men.
At the beginning, they think that there’s some sort of spiritual or strange people. I wondered just out of curiosity, was that actually taken from any of the oral history records that you transcribed?
Monty Soutar: What I can say is that, every story that’s in the novel may not have happened to my family, but it happened on our coast to one of the families around there.
And that particular account that you’re referring to is recorded in one of the Maori newspapers and even what was said and how they were perceived and you think about it they’ve never seen white people before.
And as I read the account – and it’s written in the Maori language – Captain Cook’s men were rowing towards them with their backs turned, so they thought, ‘well these are some sort of gods, because they’ve got eyes in the back of their heads’ because of the way that they’re coming at us.
I tried to imagine even though it’s written about what was said in the conversation between the two groups of people, just what must have been going through my ancestor’s heads, seeing these people for the first time who are fair-skinned.
On our coast we have a tradition of turehu or fairy people who are fair-skinned.
Monty Soutar’s years on the Waitangi Tribunal
And these sailors looked, resembled those people. So you can imagine what they were thinking. These aren’t human. We need to treat them with respect because they’re probably gods or urukehu. Urukehu is what we call people on these East Coast who have fair skin and a reddish Auburn here.
And we have a tradition of that. And I think that’s what, who they thought these people were.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Yeah. But moving along from the specific books to your wider career, you’ve mentioned about the tribunal. For those who aren’t so familiar with New Zealand history, perhaps you could just fill in some of the gaps. The Waitangi Tribunal was established to hear grievances for land losses, and you’ve been sitting on it for 20 years.
You would’ve heard huge amount of history that never has made it to the general populace during those years. Tell us a bit about that.
Monty Soutar: Yes, it’s a Commission of Inquiry and it was set up under an Act of the New Zealand Parliament in 1975. And so, it’s inquisitorial, it’s not adversarial, but we hear evidence from claimants. And we hear the Crown’s response to it.
For historical, most of the ones that have been heard to date for historical grievances where the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed in 1840 between Maori and the Crown which allowed the British the govern, but it protected the rights of Maori.
Wherever there’s been a breach, people can bring claims about that breach. And our job is to write a report to the government after we’ve heard all the evidence about whether we believe there’s a breach, here so that the government can then settle those claims.
In the process, we hear all this information about that area or the tribes from that area. That really is a privilege.
It’s like what I’ve written in the novel, this was in-house information I wrote that’s usually kept for the marae or kept for your family.
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Gathering the stories for people to hear
It’s not put out there into the big wide world, and similarly with what comes before the tribunal, you wouldn’t normally hear these tribes talking to anyone else but themselves about their past.
It’s all recorded and we have all the evidence that was put before us, but the only thing that goes public is the reports we write. They’re often quite complex. and difficult to condense, and I think it’s a shame, because it really is New Zealand’s history, that we haven’t done more to make it accessible to New Zealanders.
One of the reasons I’m writing this novel series is to take a lot of my experience and drawing from that and through this one family story try and give people insight into what else must be out there.
And I’m hoping too, that tribal historians will pick up the pen or pick up the laptop and do for their own areas what I’ve done in terms of the story I’ve taken from the East Coast.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Look Monty as reader because it is The Joys of Binge Reading, we do like to ask everyone we talk to about books they’d like to recommend you may well have some fiction books you want to recommend, but I was particularly curious to hear about the books you read on holiday.
I see you referred to the fact that when you were in Greece, you started to reads historical novels so that you get a feel for the historical novel form and perhaps being a reader myself, I was quite curious what historical novels did you read at that point, and do you recall any of them particularly?
Monty Soutar: Well, of course I read Roots.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, of course. Yes.
What Monty read in preparation for writing
Monty Soutar: That was the first one. But some of the ones that come to mind – and you’ve got to remember I’m going from almost zero novel reading because I was only ever interested in non-fiction.
If it’s not true, I wasn’t that keen on reading it.
But I read this book by a Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart and I was interested in it because it dealt with southeast Nigeria in the pre-colonial period, then the invasion by Europeans, and particularly the impact of Christianity on that part of Nigeria.
I found that really interesting. Of course, Tolstoy’s War And Peace. I read particularly because somebody told me that it follows this family through and you watch the kids grow up into marriage and that sort of thing. And I thought that’s what I was going to do with my novel, only follow a guy’s story through.
While I was in Greece, I read this book called The Island by Victoria Hislop. And it was about Spinalonga, a beautiful Greek island where they put people with leprosy onto the island. It’s great. A great book. It made me understand more about that sickness and how people reacted to it back in the 1950s.
I was fascinated because I love Greece. It really resonated with me.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, that was about Jacob’s daughter Dinah, who has got a little mention in the Bible, but she takes the story of Dinah and imagines what it must have been like for this daughter.
Remember, Jacob had 12 sons and it follows through what happened to her because she was taken by a king of another tribe.
And I like that one because, my wife recommended it to me by the way, she had read it. And because I had to get my head into the minds of woman particularly in terms of a love affair.
And in my novel the protagonist, he meets the love of his life at a very young age. I wanted to try and understand this young woman and her experiences. And then there was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall which looked at Thomas Cromwell’s rise the power in King Henry VIII’s court.
A heartfelt desire to capture young readers
Again, I wanted to follow through, because I knew my novel was the story of someone’s life and how they rise the power. And that’s another reason I read that it was recommended to me.
And The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton back here in New Zealand, because it had a Maori character in there and it was based in New Zealand.
I wanted to learn from that. And I read Patricia Grace’s book Tu, which is about a Maori who goes off the war, because in book three I probably – well I haven’t planned book three yet, but it’s probably going to touch on a character like that.
Jenny Wheeler: You got a lot of reading in, didn’t you?
Monty Soutar: Well, I was basically sitting on a beach, my wife and I, and we had to do something and, once I’d realized I’m going write a novel, I thought, well, I don’t know how to do that. I really need to learn very quickly. And I thought the fastest way was to read novels.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I think it’s lovely that you are very interested to get younger readers involved, younger people interested, and to do that, I think you are right. You do have to use some form of genre to do that. Either book or audio book, or hopefully in the end TV as well, film. This probably will get translated into some sort of visual medium.
Because although there are readers it’s much harder for younger people to concentrate on books these days Probably.
A book written for TV or film
Monty Soutar: Absolutely. And if you’ve read the book, you’ll appreciate that every scene I’ve written and I was told to do it like this, to try and imagine you are watching it on the big screen because young people were my target audience and I know, even at the best of my ability that then a lot of them aren’t going to read, but they’re going to watch it.
I’ve written it like a movie, I know it’s a matter of time that it’ll be turned into a movie. I’ve already had a number of approaches. If you read the scenes you can see, people say, you can almost touch the past when you read this book, a past that was never available to people.
And it’s because I’ve had in mind to capture young people, I’ve got to get this turned into some sort of moving picture that everybody’s watching it on their phones or they’re going to movies or they’re watching it on their laptops. I’ve got that in mind.
The writing, the book series, is only one of the steps towards the outcome that I have in mind.
Jenny Wheeler: I can absolutely agree with you that you can, you just feel you can picture it.
You feel you do have a much better understanding of what life must have been like then, no doubt about it. Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing about your whole writing career that you change, what would it be?
Monty Soutar: I think that I would’ve believed in myself a lot earlier than I have, in terms of my ability to write fiction. I’d thought about it way back in the nineties, actually, even back when I was at intermediate school, when I was about 12.
We had this assignment, we had to write a couple of chapters. I think mine was on my uncle who had gone to the Second World War.
And the teacher told me then, “oh, you’ve got some ability.” But I didn’t believe it, because there were no role models for me.
There was nobody in my family that been in university and most of them that finished school at maybe form two, at the end of primary school.
And I didn’t see many Maori who were writers. Witi Ihimaera hadn’t even written his first novel then
There just was nothing that showed me that, well, there’s a space for Maori in fiction. So that’s what, yeah. On reflection, I would’ve liked to have changed. I could have, and I probably would’ve written a lot more by now and at a much younger age.
The ‘secret’ of Monty’s success
Jenny Wheeler: If there was one thing, that you attribute your success, Monty and your writing, what would it be?
Monty Soutar: What I attribute my success to? Honestly, I’ve got a strong faith. And I know that this is God that’s really doing this. I don’t, just don’t doubt it. I’ve had enough experience.
I know where that voice came from. I know that. I say in the in the back of my book that you speak to God through prayer and he speaks to you through intuition.
And I know the success of this book and the whole series is totally due to him, not me. And I always make that point to people who might understand what I’m talking about.
Jenny Wheeler: You still are doing your work on the Waitangi Tribunal. Give us an idea of what your working day looks like now, and how you factor in all the things, the demands you’ve got on your time.
Monty Soutar: Remember I left my full-time employment. My only distraction is the tribunal. We have a hearing for about a week, every two months. But in order to prepare for that week’s hearing you’re probably going to read for at least a week and a half.
So every second month I’m losing half that month to prepare and go to hearings.
Other than that, though, I would be writing or reading anything that is working towards the goal of getting the second book out.
But there are distractions. We’re about to have our first grandchild in a couple of weeks. We were hit by Cyclone Gabrielle earlier this year. My father died about a month ago, so it’s almost as if with the second book, there’s something trying to stop me writing it.
Where to find Kawai internationally
I sometimes I feel like that. But maybe in listening to my story, you’ll realize that I’m a determined person. If I set my mind on something, I will make it happen. Come, hell or high water. And in terms of this year, I expect to have completed this second book around November and then we’ll go into the stages with the editor of refining it for publication next year.
Jenny Wheeler: Great. Do you have an overall title for the series?
Monty Soutar: Yeah. The series is Kawai, and each book has got a different name that appears like the sub title. This first one was For Such A Time As This. The second one has already got its subtitle. It’s The Tree Of Nourishment. But Kawai will be the name that runs right through. Kawai in Maori means something like roots, it means lineage or your family line.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, that’s The Tree Of Nourishment,
Monty Soutar: Yes. And I won’t give away what that’s all about.
Jenny Wheeler: No, That’s fair enough. Tell us, for international readers, where can they get copies of the book if they’re interested in it? Is it available internationally?
Monty Soutar: Yes, well the easiest way to get it internationally is through Fishpond. If you Google on Fishpond and my name you’ll get it, and they ship it everywhere.
And if you’re in Australia, Booktopia is probably the most efficient way to get it. Or John Reed books. That’s our distributor over there.
I understand it’s available as an ebook on Amazon through Kindle. And it is coming as an audio book. I just can’t tell you what date, but we are working on that because a lot of people here in New Zealand have requested it as an audio book because of the Maori in there.
Particularly because, to hear how it’s pronounced. And a lot of people in this country are now learning the Maori language, so that would benefit them.
Jenny Wheeler: It does give quite a bit of Maori language, and that’s important because it helps you to really get integrated into the world, but you’ve got a full glossary at the back so that if people are feeling a little bit lost with the language, it’s all there in the back, isn’t it?
Where to find Monty online – or in person
Monty Soutar: Yes, the glossary is there, but every sentence where they might speak in Maori has got the English translations following straight after it.
A lot of people who just want to get to the English will skip the Maori, but the Maori is there to remind people that hey, in that period, this is the language they were speaking and that it, I think it’s another way of helping you to enter that period.
Jenny Wheeler: I agree. How do you interact with readers? I don’t know if you’ve got a Facebook page set up or whatever, anything like that, or how can they reach you if they want to introduce a conversation?
Monty Soutar: Yes, my Facebook page is Monty Soutar author, Monty Soutar author. And so that’s one way of connecting with me right now. I’m head down of course, and I don’t answer everybody’s queries.
And if anybody’s asking me about what’s in the next book or what happened as a result of the first book, I don’t tend to answer those people.
Jenny Wheeler: Very cheeky of them to ask, I think.
Monty Soutar – at a festival coming your way soon
Monty Soutar: Oh, they do. They do. I do appreciate readers feedback. I love going out to the festivals and to the bookshops to talk to readers. It’s rewarding and it enthuses me to carry on writing and you wouldn’t get that unless you’re talking to readers.
So yeah, I do welcome it.
Jenny Wheeler: Would you consider doing international festivals at this stage? Interrupting your writing process, or were you guarding your time rather?
Monty Soutar: Ah, that’s the other thing I should have mentioned, that it’s not just a tribunal I’m doing, but I’ve got a stack of festivals that I’m doing this year, mostly in New Zealand,
And Australia have invited me to be part of a festival over there because the book is starting to move in Australia and I’m sure there’ll be more there. I like speaking to people and speaking to audiences.
I’ve done that all my life, so I enjoy that. And I just love getting feedback from different cultures. Even though this is a story about Maori and New Zealand the indigenous people of New Zealand, it’ll resonate with people all over the world. I know that all indigenous people when they read this book will see their own story in it.
But I also know too that in the same way that New Zealand is on the cusp of change I feel lots of other countries around the world are wanting to find, wanting to know more about how indigenous people, perceive the world.
Because we have done so much damage to the world. We’re all starting to realize, well, maybe there’s something in the knowledge that indigenous people have.
And for that reason, I think a lot of people will read this novel series.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic, Monty, that’s a great place to finish. Thank you so much for your time today.
Monty Soutar: Thank you, Jenny, and I appreciate you contacting me and reading the book and enjoying it as you did.
If you enjoyed Monty you will also enjoy Michael Bennett
A serial killer investigation led by a tenacious Maori detective Hana Westerman which reveals a darker side to Kiwi paradise and highlights the truth that the past never truly stays buried.
Another stunning debut novel from on of New Zealand’s most skilled scree writers.
LISTEN TO MICHAEL BENNETT
On Binge Reading next week
Jenny Wheeler: On Binge Reading next week a complete change of pace, Juliette Fay, and a tender second coming of age love story, The Half Of It.
One perfect night. 40 years of buried hurt. One chance to make it right. Can the past ever be fixed with humor and grace?
USA today best-selling author Juliet Faye delivers an immensely satisfying page turner.
Perfect for fans of Josie Silver and Jojo Moyes.
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Thanks for listening and happy reading.