Maraea Rakuraku
New Zealand poet and playwright
Maraea Rakuraku is a New Zealand playwright. Her play The Prospect won her New Playwright of the Year at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards in 2012. She won the Adam NZ Play Award in 2016 for Tan-Knee, which also won Best Play by a Māori Writer and Best Play by a Woman Writer.
She completed a doctorate at the International Institute of Modern Letters of Victoria University of Wellington in 2024, where she earned an MA in 2016.
Rakuraku works to provide space for those peoples who sit on the margins while exploring the continued impact of colonialism in 21st Century Aotearoa.
Plays
Rakuraku's first full-length play The Prospect was awarded three Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards in 2012, including New Playwright of the Year. In 2012, Rakuraku also took home the annual Tau Mai e Kapiti Writer in Residence award. The play explores the trauma of colonization: “'How one culture assimilates another and the trail of destruction wrought as a result.' And there are moments that also echo the atrocities and justifications wrought by fundamentalism in every guise around the world and throughout history. In short, The Prospect proves how universal a culturally specific story can be. As for the prospects for our futures – that's up to us all, and seeing this play will contribute greatly to our collective understanding, as well as giving us a rich and insightful theatrical experience."
Rakuraku's second play, Tan-Knee, is the first of a planned trilogy, about a family of the Tūhoe iwi (tribe).
“Maraea Rakuraku” enters the record as new Zealand poet and playwright. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Maraea, Rakuraku and Zealand can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q54860673. VIAF identifies the subject as 14152682562023312073. The Library of Congress control number is no2018061349. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2016 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maraea Rakuraku” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.