To say Airini Beautrais, author of the story collection Bug Week, was the dark horse at this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards is an understatement. No one was more surprised when her name was announced — winner of the $57,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction — than the writer herself.
Beautrais had no speech prepared because there seemed no way that a story collection, slight and obscure, could win against three serious novels, including two by former winners. No story collection had won our major fiction prize since Charlotte Grimshaw with Opportunity in 2008, and Grimshaw was already well established as a novelist. Beautrais was a poet publishing fiction for the first time.
Bug Week sold out instantly, reflecting the media impact and the book's modest initial print run. Before the win, the collection was "undiscovered", according to its publisher, Fergus Barrowman at VUP. Afterwards, it was reprinted twice. Nielsen figures reveal that in the week of its win — also the week of the Auckland Writers Festival — Bug Week sold almost three times the number sold in the 10-week lead-up to the awards.
Beautrais' story collection, says Jenna Todd of Time Out Books in Mt Eden, "could definitely sell a few thousand now versus a few hundred". Could this mean New Zealanders will start reading more story collections and anthologies, long the poor relation here — as they are in the UK and US — compared with novels?
Bug Week is #4 in Time Out's June bestseller list, but Todd admits she doesn't expect it to have the same reach as last year's winner, Auē by Becky Manawatu. That novel was the shop's bestseller of the year across all categories, the first time a New Zealand book achieved that since The Luminaries won the Booker Prize in 2013. "It won't have quite the same Book Club impact," she says. "Sometimes you have to work a little harder with a short story."