Chapman grew up in the Wellington Region.[5] Her father was born and raised in Lincoln,Nebraska,while her mother grew up on Upolu in Samoa.[6] Chapman has Tuvaluan heritage through her maternal grandfather,and Chinese heritage through her great-grandfather.[6] Chapman has nine siblings,and was an avid reader as a child.[6][7]
Chapman received a scholarship to attend Samuel Marsden Collegiate School in Wellington,where she competed in basketball,athletics and cricket events.[7][8][9] In 2011 she won the Norwood Award for Outstanding Girls Under 20 player of the year,[10] and was also named the College Sport Wellington women's Cricket Player of the Year.[11]
Sporting career
From 2010 to 2013,Chapman played cricket professionally for the Wellington Blaze.[12][13][14][2] In 2012,Chapman joined the Samoa women's national cricket team,playing seven rounds in the 2012 Pepsi ICC East Asia Pacific Women's Trophy and topping the batting leader board for the competition.[15][16] Chapman continued to compete for Samoa until 2014.[17]
Representing Auckland-based North Harbour Bays Athletics,Chapman first competed in New Zealand athletics competitions as a javelin thrower in 2013.[1][18] She attended the New Zealand Athletics Championships in 2013,winning two gold medals for the javelin throw.[1] In 2014,Chapman quit athletics due to an injury.[19]
Chapman returned to athletics competitions in late 2016 and 2017.[1] At the Porritt Classic in 2017,Chapman was the champion women's javelin thrower (49.18 m).[20] At the 2017 New Zealand national championships,Chapman won a gold medal with a career-best javelin throw of 50.98 metres,[1] outcompeting national champion Tori Peeters at the competition.[21] As of 2022,this ranks Chapman fourth in the list of record holders for New Zealand Women's javelin throw.[22]
In 2016,Chapman became a staff writer for online magazine The Spinoff,[7] beginning as an intern.[25] In the same year,Chapman was asked to ghostwrite New Zealand professional basketball player Steven Adams' autobiography,which was published in 2018.[26] Chapman had known Adams since childhood,as both had played in Wellington regional high school basketball competitions.[26]
While at The Spinoff,Chapman appeared on Three infotainment television programme The Spinoff TV (2018),[6] and has written and directed Scratched:Aotearoa's Lost Sporting Legends (2019 onwards),an NZ On Air-funded documentary webseries.[27] In 2018,Chapman won the Young Business Journalist of the Year award at the New Zealand Shareholders' Association's 2018 Business Journalism Awards,[28] and the best opinion writer (humour/satire) award at the 2019 Voyager Media Awards.[29] Some of Chapman's best-known works include pieces on housing unaffordability,[30]sleep inertia aiding lamps,[31] and ranking lists of snack foods such as biscuits and lollies.[32] Her 2018 article exposing false country of origin practices by Denise L'Estrange-Corbet's fashion label World won the award for best (single) news story / scoop at the 2019 Voyager Media Awards.[33]
Chapman left The Spinoff as a writer in early 2020,taking a break from journalism.[25] During the same year,Chapman released A New Kind of Leader,a biography of New Zealand Prime MinisterJacinda Ardern she was commissioned to write in 2019.[34][35] When print magazine North &South was relaunched in late 2020,Chapman became the publication's senior editor.[36] In late 2021,Chapman became the co-editor of The Spinoff,alongside long time Spinoff staff writer Alex Casey.[37][38] She is due to step down as editor later in 2025.[39]
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