Feilding writer Christall Lowe wins an Ockham New Zealand Book Award for te ao Māori cookbook

Feilding writer and chef Christall Lowe says her cookbook 'Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from my Family Table' has been many years in the making, and every recipe in it has been rigorously tested by her whānau and photographed by her.

Feilding writer and chef Christall Lowe has won the Judith Binney Best First Book Illustrated Non-Fiction Award at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Her cookbook Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from my Family Table is published by Bateman Books.

“Kai has everything you’d expect from an internationally recognised food photographer: elegant and enticing images, topped with well-placed illustrations and the compelling use of colour,” category convenor of judges Jared Davidson says.

“But it is the substance of the book that shines. Whānau stories and recipes provide the reader with a wider insight into te ao Māori, creating a homage to food that is both grounded in tradition yet modern. Kai is the Edmonds cookbook for our time.”

Lowe (Ngāti Kauwhata, Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto) received $3,000 and a 12-month membership subscription to the New Zealand Society of Authors.

Writing for Newsroom, Steve Braunias called Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from my Family Table by Christall Lowe the best cookbook of 2022.

Catherine Chidgey won the $64,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockhams for The Axeman’s Carnival. It is described as a page-turning novel of depth, pathos and humanity that skilfully infuses comedy with a building sense of menace, narrated by a precocious magpie called Tama.

Scholar, poet and irredentist Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry for Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised.

Broadcaster, music critic and author Nick Bollinger won the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction for Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Historian and lawyer Ned Fletcher won the General Non-Fiction Award for his work The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Four Best First Book Awards, supported by the Mātātuhi Foundation, were presented at the awards ceremony held in Auckland on Wednesday.

Home Theatre by Anthony Lapwood (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Pākehā) received the Hubert Church Prize for Fiction.

We’re All Made of Lightning by Khadro Mohamed received the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry.

Grand: Becoming my Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy received the E.H. McCormick Prize for General Non-Fiction.