Patricia Frances Grace DCNZM QSO (née Gunson; born 17 August 1937) is a New Zealand writer of novels, short stories, and children's books.

Her most well-known novel, Potiki (1986) features a Māori community opposing the private development of their ancestral land.

[8] She attended St Anne's School in Wellington, where she later described experiencing racism: "I found that being different meant that I could be blamed – for a toy gun being stolen, for writing being chalked on a garage wall, for neighbourhood children swearing, for a grassy hillside being set alight".

[1] 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".

[13] Grace's first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978), was about the relationship of a Māori woman and Pākehā man and their experiences coming from different cultures.

[15] In 1984 she collaborated with painter Robyn Kahukiwa to produce Wahine Toa, a book about women from Māori legends.

[1] Although she continued working as a full-time teacher until 1985, her income in this period was supplemented by grants from the New Zealand Literary Fund in 1975 and 1983.

[1][16][3][18] Grace subsequently published Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street / Te Tuna Watakirihi me Nga Tamariki o te Tiriti o Toa (1984), also illustrated by Kahukiwa (and published in English, Māori and Samoan) and several Māori language readers.

[27] Academic Roger Robinson said that while the book sometimes seems like a polemic, "Grace's descriptive and impressionistic skills, her insight into the consciousness of women and children, and the sustained inwardness of the Māori perspective, make Cousins a significant and uniquely Māori version of the genre of family saga".

[30] Pauline Swain, reviewing the book for The Dominion, praised Grace's "deceptively light touch with material that in other hands could be bombastic or preachy", and noted "her portrayal of contemporary issues such as land claims and the right to use genetic information for research loses nothing in impact for all its delicately oblique handling".

[29] Reviewer Simone Drichel observed that although the book shared some similarities in setting and characters with Potiki, the "nature of the challenges" faced by Maori had changed in the intervening years: "For the first time ... it is not primarily the interaction with Pakeha that poses a challenge for Maori, but Maoridom itself.

Elspeth Sandys observed in 2001 that the release of a new novel by Grace was "one of the more significant events in [New Zealand's] literary calendar".

[34] Reviewer Iain Sharp praised Grace's compassionate treatment of the subject, concluding: "The crowning achievement of this fine writer's career, Tu will surely become one of the classics of our literature".

[38] Grace was approached around this time by the family of Ned Nathan, a Māori Battalion soldier who was wounded in Crete, and his wife Katina, a Cretan woman who nursed him back to health, and asked to write the story of their relationship.

[39] At this time Grace put aside her draft novel (later to be published as Chappy in 2015) in order to concentrate on family responsibilities, including caring for her mother and husband.

[38] It is a family saga about a relationship between a Japanese man and a Māori woman, and is structured with multiple narrators and events related in a non-linear way.

[39][38][40] Simone Oettli, in her review for Landfall, noted that the themes of the book include "acceptance of cultural differences ... disappearance and loss, love and belonging, as well as the craft of storytelling".

[46] Reviewer Emma Espiner said of the book that it "relays a lifetime of doing things her own way"; "The picture that emerges is of a quietly determined, subversive and nuanced thinker".

[18] In the same year, her novel Cousins (1992) was adapted into the feature film of the same name, directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith.

[30] Grace-Smith was previously married to Grace's son, and had attended the launch of the novel 19 years earlier at Takapūwāhia Marae.

Helen Clark, then the prime minister of New Zealand, said her work "played a key role in the emergence of Maori fiction in English".

[30] Grace was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DCNZM), for services to literature, in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours.

"Grace received an honorary Doctorate of Letters (DLit) from the World Indigenous Nations University in 2016, conferred at Te Wānanga o Raukawa, Ōtaki, for her literary accomplishments and her writing around Māori themes.

[3] In 2014, she won a legal battle against the New Zealand Government, which had tried to compulsorily acquire land at Hongoeka Bay under the Public Works Act in order to build an expressway.

[3][10] The court decided that the land, which was the last remaining part of Wi Parata's landholdings held by his descendants, should be protected as a Māori reservation.

[5][6][69] As of 2021[update], Grace was still living in Hongoeka, on her ancestral land and close to her home marae (meeting place).