Montana list down to last three

By MARGIE THOMSON

The second-to-last act of this year's Montana New Zealand Book Awards took place yesterday, staged in what used to be the old Farmers building tearooms, now glossily upscaled by the Heritage Hotel as an appropriate venue for a who's who of this country's literary set.

First-timers mixed with the already famous in this one annual event to "dance around the totem pole of New Zealand literature", as novelist and short story writer Owen Marshall put it, himself a previous winner and a finalist this time.

The Montanas incorporate an enormous sweep of writing styles and genres. Winners of each of the eight non-fiction categories were announced, and together these winners jump into the odd melting pot that is the shortlist for the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction, in which poets contend with historians, environmentalists and artists.

The Montana Medal and the Deutz Medal for Fiction will be announced at an even glitzier function in Christchurch on July 22.

The list of five novelists was reduced to a shortlist of three. The astonishing fact accompanying the fiction shortlist was that all three (and a further one from the longlist) are published by Vintage, an imprint of Random House, and share the same editor, Harriet Allen.

The three - Fiona Farrell (The Hopeful Traveller), Stephanie Johnson (The Shag Incident) and Owen Marshall (When Gravity Snaps) - all paid their respects to Allen, whom Marshall described as "having an aura about her head".

Allen, if such things were acknowledged, also "won" last year's Deutz Medal along with Craig Marriner, for Stonedogs.

The constant cry from the judges - exhausted from reading all of the 173 entries to the awards, and represented on stage by Tony Simpson and Marilyn Waring, but with their convener Brian Phillips prevented by illness from attending - was the extreme difficulty of judging within categories where the offerings are so fundamentally different from each other. How do you compare a 700-page work of a lifetime, such as Derek Challis' biography of his mother Robin Hyde, The Book of Iris, with a slim memoir of 200 pages that is nevertheless stylish and accomplished, such as W.H. Oliver's Looking for the Phoenix, Waring rhetorically asked.

Nowhere was this problem more acute than in the Lifestyle and Contemporary Culture category, where a book on wine competed against a tribute to the Volunteer Service Abroad agency, Samoan art, and mountaineering. Michael Cooper's Wine Atlas of New Zealand won. The Environment category was won by Geoff Chapple for Te Araroa: The New Zealand Trail.