Ockham NZ Books Awards finalists announced for 2024 - who are this year’s literary heavy hitters?

Author Eleanor Catton is nominated for her novel Birnam Wood. Photo / Murdo Macleod

Each year, as autumn begins to bear down on us, the finalists for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are announced. This year’s shortlist, released today, spans 11 publishers and 16 titles (four for each category), with mega-best-selling writers and a thrilling list of less familiar names whose voices we get to see flourish.

The authors vying for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and a conceivably life-changing $65,000, are Eleanor Catton for her novel Birnam Wood; Pip Adam for Audition; Stephen Daisley for A Better Place; and Emily Perkins for Lioness.

Certainly, it is a four-piece band of literary heavy hitters. Catton’s Birnam Wood has been one of the buzziest releases to come out of Aotearoa recently. Part of that is because absence makes you miss things (it took her 10 years to write this novel after her intricately spun, Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries). But it is also because Birnam Wood is a stunner, an ecological thriller about a guerilla gardening group and a billionaire doomsteader that keeps one foot in the genre while carefully muddying the central tension of good versus bad and underpinning it with a slew of pertinent, thorny questions: What does it mean to know someone? How well do we know ourselves? Which version of us is real?

Catton believes the “psychological health of culture” can be measured by the state of the arts. “Artistic expression is what helps us to figure out, collectively, what we want to be,” she tells me. “What we choose to remember and to forget, what makes us angry, what makes us laugh, what revolts us, what shames us, what we think is possible and impossible, what our hypocrisies and blindnesses might be.”

Pip Adam is nominated for Audition. Photo / Rebecca McMillan Photography

Adam’s Audition, which skews interstellar, is about systems of power. A group of giants are jettisoned away from Earth for being too big, squashed on a spaceship called Audition with engineered gravity and a predicament: the belief that if they stop talking, they’ll keep growing. It’s a bodily exploration as much as one through cosmos and incarceration, drawing on Adam’s appetite for the edgier, the livelier. Like her earlier works, including the fashion satire The New Animals, which won the Acorn Prize in 2018, and her probe of surveillance capitalism Nothing To See, which was shortlisted in 2020, Adam has created something quite rare here: a novel that’ll have you hankering for the kind of social realism that’s also like drinking a cocktail you’ve never heard of.

For Adam, what she admires the most about writing in Aotearoa right now is “that which challenges injustice with stories that resonate with emotional truth”, she says. “[Works] that offer ways to ‘feel’ our way back to some kind of resistance.”

Stephen Daisley is nominated for A Better Place.

Australia-based, Kiwi-raised Daisley joins Adam as an Acorn alum, having won the award in 2016 for outback drama Coming Rain. His most recent work, A Better Place, is another shining example of the style that makes him stand out amongst his contemporaries, rendered in a tale of twin Taranaki brothers who head to Crete for their country during World War II. Daisley plaits prose that’s at times detail-rich and detail-spare. The result is a work of fierce lyricism that has also been longlisted for the prestigious British literary award for historical fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, alongside Zadie Smith and Rose Tremain, among others.

Daisley’s nomination is reaffirming for him. “I was not published until I was 55,” he says. “Before that, I had been writing for 40 years, quietly, without telling anyone. I was in the army for a while, and I also worked as a shearer, truck driver, bush cutter … it wasn’t the sort of environment where telling your mates you were trying to write a book would be well-received. I struggled for a long time. I learned, as Samuel Beckett said, ‘to fail better’.”

Emily Perkins is nominated for Lioness.

Perkins’ Lioness is comparatively rooted in the mundane. What begins as a portrait of domesticity, of a moneyed-by-marriage woman called Therese Thorn in the years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic, becomes an incisive portrait about the unraveling of it — and of Therese. Reading it feels like focusing your eyes on a particularly eventful snapshot of the performance of womanhood, strolling unwittingly through the dark complexities of character and a wellspring of rage.

Juliet Blythe, convenor of judges for the Acorn Prize, says what they were reading for were books that “that make us uncomfortable sometimes, that tells us something about who we are, that we remember long after we have put them down”, explaining these four authors are united by their sense of social conscience but are unique in their approaches. “The beauty and the accomplishment of the shortlist is that they do all of these things, and more, in excitingly different ways.”

Awards are not only a way of recognising the value of the arts, Catton says, but also a way to stimulate conversation and create a historical record that we can think about and learn from. “It’s good to be reminded that excellence is both myriad and ever-changing,” she muses.

This year’s reminder, then, is a strong one. Three debut poetry collections — At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching, Chinese Fish by Grace Yee, and Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) — are amongst the finalists for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry ($12,000), which also includes Root Leaf Flower Fruit by Bill Nelson.

Lynn Freeman, convenor of judges for the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction ($12,000), has also declared it the year of the “lavishly illustrated” art book. Among the finalists is everything from mushrooms to muscle. Liv Sisson’s Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide, with its beautiful photos of odd-looking organisms, is nominated, as is the sports compendium Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History by Ryan Bodman. There are resurrections of artists too, with Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds, and Bridget Reweti, and Don Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien.

The General Non-Fiction Award ($12,000) is nothing if not generous with ideas. In the collection An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays, finalist and scholar Damon Salesa pens perspectives on migration and empires, while Jeff Evans offers an education in carving and voyaging traditions in Ngātokimatawhaorua: The Biography of a Waka. These are books about the blending of personal histories with cultural forces, too. Barbara Else was named a finalist for her memoir Laughing at the Dark, a course in rebellion well-crafted at the line level, alongside There’s a Cure for This by Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou), a cutting story of working as a wahine Māori in medicine.

The winners will be announced on May 15 at the Auckland Writers Festival.