Shilo Kino

Kino, Shilo (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maniapoto) (1989) was born in Whangārei, grew up in Waipu and is of Ngāpuhi and Tainui descent. Shilo is primarily a journalist and has worked for Newsroom, North and South, The Spinoff, The Guardian and Pantograph Punch. In 2018 Shilo was awarded a place on the Māori Literature Trust writers' incubator, Te Papa Tupu. In 2021 she studied a full-time immersion te reo Māori course at Te Wānanga o Takiura, an experience she documented in the podcast Back to Kura.

Shilo’s debut novel, The Pōrangi Boy (Huia Publishers) was released in May 2020. Inspired by protests against the building of Ngawha prison, The Pōrangi Boy is set in the small fictional town of Pohe Bay, which like Ngawha, is the home to sacred hot springs and a taniwha. The story is told from the point of view of 12-year-old Niko, who is caught between taunting classmates, and upholding the mana of his “pōrangi” koro, who fights against the development to save the Taumete, the taniwha and his home.

The Pōrangi Boy has been described by reviewers as a “truly captivating, Kiwi story,” with relationships between Niko and his whanau as being both “heart-warming and heart-wrenching.” At the 2021 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, The Pōrangi Boy won the Young Adult Fiction Award, where the book was described as a “hard-hitting” story, with characters “brought to life by Shilo Kino’s deft hand.”

Shilo was one of the recipients of the 2022 Māori Literature Trust's Emerging Māori Writers Residency. In 2024 Shilo released her second book, All That We Know (Moa Press), which deals with activism, social media, and colonisation.