Wine book win stirs literary pot

By MARGIE THOMSON, books editor

Controversy greeted the announcement that the winner of the Montana Book Awards Montana Medal for Non-Fiction was Michael Cooper's Wine Atlas of New Zealand.

The fuss wasn't over the quality of the book, but its type - a non-literary reference book, albeit beautifully produced.

Poor Cooper. It seems churlish to blame him for a simple if problematic fact about the Montana non-fiction prize: that it is contended for by amazingly disparate books.

The logic-defying fact is not that a wine reference book won the prize, but that it was ever in contention against books from the history, biography and even poetry categories.

How can a judge compare a lavish production such as the Wine Atlas with a slim volume of poetry produced by a small publisher, or with a 12-year research effort that resulted in a book such as Philip Temple's A Sort of Conscience, which everyone agrees contains crucial thinking about who we are as a nation?

Linda Henderson, chief executive of Booksellers New Zealand and chairwoman of the management committee for the Montana Awards, firmly believes that there is a process and a logic behind the judges' decision.

They work with very clear guidelines, which include:

* Consideration of the book as a whole, giving attention to the integration of all the contributing elements.

* Enduring literary merit and overall quality of authorship.

* Production factors, including design, typography, indexing and the standard of editing.

* Impact of the book on the community, taking account of such factors as topicality, public interest, commercial viability, entertainment, cultural and educational values, lifespan and value for money.

The Montana Awards management committee, which includes representatives from publishers, Creative New Zealand, booksellers, the Society of Authors and sponsor Montana Wines, has proved itself highly adaptable since its inception in 1996, when the Montana Awards and the New Zealand Book Awards merged.

It has steadily evolved from offering one major award to two big awards, increasing the categories from five to eight (creating separate categories for history and biography, for instance) and changing the structure of the awards to a complicated long list/short list/finalist process that some people find interminable but is designed to give greater profile to books along the way.

Responding to the observation that poetry sits most incongruously among the non-fiction categories, Henderson says the management committee is reviewing that point and will come to a decision at its next meeting.

Before reaching the level of the Montana Medal, books in all non-fiction categories are judged against books of a like kind, and the winners of those categories are awarded $5000 and then go on to compete against each other for the final $10,000 prize.

Henderson says this process is consistent with that of overseas awards such as Britain's Whitbread, which filters all categories, including fiction and non-fiction and children's books, into just one prize.

We, on the other hand, have separate children's book awards, and distinct prizes for fiction and non-fiction.

On the other hand, Whitbread is but one among many book awards literary and otherwise that British authors may compete for.

Perhaps in time we will move away from the one-size-fits-all approach.

This year, however, an unorthodox choice quite legitimately won.

Which also goes to show that, guidelines and scrupulous processes aside, in the end the decision is not so much scientific as subjective: these judges simply preferred one book over another.