Emma Espiner

Hold the front page: The Spinoff’s cover stories for 2022

Introducing a new Spinoff campaign giving some of our biggest 2022 stories the print cover treatment. The Spinoff is an online magazine. That’s how we have always described our work and our approach. We write, edit and curate our work as if it will…

Health experts endorse Efeso Collins for Auckland mayor in open letter

The councillor’s role in the South Auckland community during Covid outbreaks speak to his strengths, say the 20 signatories. A group of 20 health professionals and academics have thrown their weight behind Efeso Collins in an open letter published…

New Zealand is now as it was – but nothing is the same

We’ve just experienced the most extraordinary period of the century so far, during which unprecedented restrictions were put on our lives. These largely ended this week – but, Duncan Greive writes, rather than returning to things as they were, New…

The Sunday Essay: On the frontline

Emma Espiner on the ceaselessness of this pandemic. The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand Original illustrations by Munro Te Whata I don’t know what it’s like to be a doctor in a non-Covid world. I was in my…

Book of the Week: Yasss queen

Emma Espiner (Twitter: @emmawehipeihana) comments on social issues, health, and politics. She was awarded the 2018 Hamilton Press Club prize for the Best Writer in NZ Journalism, and named Opinion Columnist of the Year at the 2019 Voyager Media…

Gavin Bishop: two reviews

Author: Gavin Bishop Format: Board Book Nico, 7: This is definitely not for under-fives. Probably for seven and above. Even if parents are reading it to little ones, there are complicated words like “resplendent” and “miraculous” and they might…

Simon Bridges is still figuring himself out – National Identity, reviewed

There’s a lot more nuance in the former National leader’s new memoir than you might expect, writes Emma Espiner. It was an inauspicious start to my relationship with Simon Bridges when, the week that I had set aside to review his memoir National…

The strange realities of being a doctor on the night shift

Sleep Week: First year doctor Emma Espiner shares the madness and mundanity of working nights in Middlemore Hospital’s medical ward. All week, The Spinoff is tossing and turning through a range of perspectives on sleep – read more Sleep Week content…

Creator Series: Emma Espiner on Getting Better

Emma Espiner is a writer, commentator, podcaster and doctor. She won Opinion Writer of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2020, the same year she completed her medical degree – her podcast about that final year as a Māori med student navigating…

Stories to Outlive Us

Emma Espiner Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface by Jacinta Ruru & Linda Waimarie Nikora (eds) (Otago University Press, 2021), 340pp., $60 Ngā Kete Mātauranga, a collection of stories from twenty-four leading Māori…

All the best zingers (and the odd clanger) from the Auckland Writers Festival

Farewell to the festival, for now, but hello to these 34 one-liners brought to you by our diligent scouts at the Aotea Centre. Emma Espiner: To my right, but actually quite far to my left … Anahera Gildea. Anahera Gildea: [Māori] were being invited…

The Pre-Panel with Emma Espiner and Raybon Kan

Panellists Raybon Kan and Emma Espiner share what they've been thinking'.

Review: From the Centre: A Writer’s Life

I’ve always viewed Patricia Grace as a kind of oracle. I have wondered how she remained steadfast all those years. Long before it was fashionable to be anti-racist, she was calling out questionable children’s books for depicting harmful stereotypes.…

How to overcome your fear of the smear – be brave like Kiritapu

Stacey Morrison, Gabrielle Baker, Emma Espiner and Leonie Hayden react to Kiritapu Allan’s cervical cancer diagnosis, and reflect on healthcare for wāhine Māori – and how we can be our own best health advocates. Yesterday the country woke to the…

A life rewritten: Charlotte Grimshaw’s memoir The Mirror Book, reviewed

‘Lovely childhood, house full of books.’ That’s the story the family told about themselves – but The Mirror Book shatters it all. Very occasionally you encounter a book where you think – this writer saved their own life in the writing of this. I…

Covid-19 has illustrated New Zealand's hypocritical attitude to Māori health

A Māori doctor on the government’s immunisation implementation advisory group, Dr Rawiri Jansen, said recently that Māori would be prioritised in the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out. A predictable outcry ensued, with familiar protestations about…

A Lot Of Harm To Put Right

Emma Espiner is a recently graduated Māori doctor. Dame Naida Glavish has been fighting for Māori in the health system for 30 years. They talk about what’s changed and the inequities that remain. Dame Naida Glavish is one of the most famous Māori…

Emma Espiner: What makes a doctor

In her final regular column for Newsroom, Emma Espiner reflects on six years of learning medicine. As you near the end of medical school, there is a dawning horror that you're not actually finishing anything - you're getting closer to the beginning.…

Emma Espiner: “I have always had a thing for the whitest of white men”

ReadingRoom 'The best of us,' writes Emma Espiner in a new journal of Māori writing, 'don’t feel bad about employing the tools of the Pākehā for our own ends while simultaneously dreaming differently, collectively, in our Indigenous souls.' I have…

What Does The Concept Of Identity Mean In Aotearoa Today?

I wear my parents' wedding on my arm. It might seem like an odd thing to do - getting this event memorialised in ink on my left forearm - because they have been divorced since I was three years old. Our families remain connected and, to me, the…