An Auckland-based Samoan Tongan poet has been awarded a three-month Fulbright scholarship in Hawaii to write creatively about cultural diplomacy.
Leilani Tamu is this year's recipient of the 2013 Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency.
She says she hopes to produce creative work on one of the last heirs to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawaii, Princess Kaiulani.
"She was very much at the forefront of trying to assert Hawaiian sovereignty at that crucial time in history. And for her, she died very young and very tragically so not many people know about Kaiulani outside of Hawaii, so I thought this project would be a good opportunity for me to learn and then potentially be inspired to write about her life in a creative way."
Leilani Tamu takes up her writer's residency based at the Center for Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu from September.