Ockham NZ Book Awards 2025 finalists Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (left), C.K. Stead and Flora Feltham. Photos / Tracey Scott, Marti Friedlander, Ebony Lamb
Ockham NZ Book Awards 2025 finalists Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (left), C.K. Stead and Flora Feltham. Photos / Tracey Scott, Marti Friedlander, Ebony Lamb
The shortlist for this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards has been released today, with 16 titles competing for prestigious literary prizes across four categories.
Spanning the genres of poetry, history and memoir, they’ve been selected from a longlist of 43 titles and 175 original entries.
The New Zealand novelists in the running for the coveted Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, worth $65,000, include three former winners in the category: Kirsty Gunn, Damien Wilkins and Laurence Fearnley. Joining them is Tina Makereti, winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
Laurence Fearnley is nominated for the Jann Medlicott Prize for Fiction for her novel At the Grand Glacier Hotel.
Makereti is a finalist for her work The Mires; Fearnley for At the Grand Glacier Hotel; Wilkins for Delirious; and Gunn for her collection of short stories Pretty Ugly.
Convenor of the Acorn Prize judging panel and author Thom Conroy says of the shortlist, “Whether set in the Scottish Highlands, at the Fox Glacier, or on the Kāpiti Coast, each of these finalists evoked a visceral and often lyrical sense of place.”
The four finalists up for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry include Emma Neale for her collection titled Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit; Robert Sullivan’s Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka; Richard von Sturmer’s Slender Volumes; and esteemed poet and novelist C.K. Stead, who at 92 is a finalist for In the Half Light of a Dying Day.
Richard von Sturmer is nominated for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry for his collection Slender Volumes. Photo / Balamohan Shingade
Convenor of judges in this category David Eggleton says the finalists include “books of literary excellence at the highest level”.
Four senior curators at Te Papa are among the finalists for the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction, including Athol McCredie for Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer and Matiu Baker, Rebecca Rice and Katie Cooper for Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa, alongside museum research associate Michael Fitzgerald.
Matiu Baker is one of three senior curators at Te Papa to be nominated for Illustrated Non-Fiction at the Ockham NZ Book Awards.
Jill Trevelyan, Greg Donson and Jennifer Taylor join them with Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist, as well as Ngarino Ellis, Deirdre Brown and the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki for Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art.
Judges' convenor Chris Szekely says of this category, “As to be expected, illustrations were high-calibre, matched well with text, and all marvellously presented through outstanding design.”
In the General Non-Fiction category, academics Richard Shaw, up for The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation, and Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, for Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery, are finalists alongside newcomers Una Cruickshank for her work The Chthonic Cycle and Flora Feltham for Bad Archive.
Uni Cruickshank is nominated for the General Non-Fiction Award at the Ockham NZ Book Awards for her work The Chthonic Cycle. Photo / Ebony Lamb
General Non-Fiction judges' convenor Holly Walker has praised “the bravery to confront big, scary existential questions, and to report back on the experience in ways that make meaning for readers” in these works.
New Zealand Book Awards Trust Te Ohu Tiaki i Te Rau Hiringa spokeswoman Nicola Legat says this year’s line-up of finalists represents a ”broad and fascinating collection of books”.
“Powerful prose and poetry, sumptuously illustrated books and gut-punching memoirs are vying with work by outstanding first-time authors on this year’s finalist list.”
The winners are set to be announced on May 14 as part of the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival, alongside four recipients of the Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Award and Te Mūrau o te Tuhi, a Māori language award, to be awarded at the judges' discretion.
The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize winner will be awarded $65,000, with the winners in the three remaining main categories receiving $12,000.
