being set alight". Grace has said that as a child she did not learn to speak Māori, because it was only spoken at formal events such as tangi (traditional Māori funeral ceremonies). She began to make efforts to learn as an adult, but found it difficult. She subsequently attended St Mary's College, where she excelled at basketball, and subsequently Wellington Teachers' Training College. It was not until she had left high school that she began to read works by New Zealand authors; she said that until this time, "I didn't kind of know that a writer was something one could aspire to be and that was partly because I'd never read writing by New Zealand writers". She began writing at age 25, while working full-time as a teacher in North Auckland. Her first published short story was "The Dream", in bilingual magazine Te Ao Hou / The New World in 1966. In 1979, South Pacific Television produced a television version of this story for the show Pacific Viewpoint. She also had early stories published in the New Zealand Listener. These early works led to a publisher approaching Grace to ask her to work on a collection of short stories. In 1974 she received the first Māori Purposes Fund Board grant for Māori writers. Literary career 1975–1990 Grace's first published book, Waiariki (1975), was the first collection of short stories to be published by a female Māori writer, and its ten stories show the diversity of Māori life and culture. Writer Rachel Nunns said these early stories "inform readers at an emotional, imaginative level with the sense of what it means to be a Maori". Grace's first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978), was about the relationship of a Māori woman and Pākehā man and their experiences of racial prejudice. It was inspired by the experiences of Grace's parents, and marked the first time a relationship of this kind had been described by a Māori writer. It was followed by her second collection of short stories The Dream Sleepers and Other Stories (1980). This collection featured a three-page story told by a mother speaking to her new baby, called "Between Earth and Sky", which is one of the best-known and most anthologised New Zealand short stories. These early works were critically acclaimed. In 1984 she collaborated with painter Robyn Kahukiwa to produce Wahine Toa, a book about women from Māori legends.