Can we declare Catherine Chidgey the winner of literary 2023? Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival, a dark rural drama featuring a talking magpie, won the year’s Ockham fiction prize and the author pocketed $64,000. The book, which came out last year and has been reprinted a number of times, remained a constant in the bestseller lists, alongside the author and creative writing teacher’s 2023 novel, Pet. A new novel, The Book of Guilt, is in the wings.
Co-winner, perhaps, would be Eleanor Catton, the expat Kiwi Booker winner whose long-awaited third novel, Birnam Wood, has sold pallet loads. It garnered fulsome critical praise, too, despite being, or perhaps because it is, a high-octane bad-billionaire literary thriller that rolls in a critique of NZ and leftist politics.
But it’s been a bumper year for New Zealand fiction in general. We’ve also had new novels from Emily Perkins, Nicky Pellegrino, Stephanie Johnson, Fiona Farrell, Carl Nixon and Pip Adam. Plus excellent debuts from the likes of Josie Shapiro, Claire Baylis, Megan Nicol Reed, Anne Tiernan, Margaret Meyer and Airana Ngarewa. Expect these names to dominate the Ockham’s fiction longlist next month.
The amount of local fiction we are buying is steadily increasing . Reportedly, only two fiction books were in the top 50 in 2021. Last year, there were six, three of them historical fiction. This year, there were three works of fiction in the top 10. As the number of local fiction titles across the genres keeps rising alongside our regular diet of biographies, nature titles and cookbooks, we can fairly confidently expect this state of affairs to continue to improve.
Supply is increasing. The arrival of Hachette’s Moa Press imprint last year (whence came Ngarewa, Meyer and Tiernan), alongside the majors such as Penguin Random House, Te Herenga Waka University Press (THWUP) and a few independents, has bumped up fiction numbers, particularly in the so-called mid-market. Moa provides another outlet for NZ authors, particularly the graduates of our busy creative writing schools, as does the Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize. In its first year it went to Shapiro’s Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts. Next March, scriptwriter Gavin Strawhan’s crime novel The Call will be published.
More NZ authors are also signing deals directly with overseas publishers, both mainstream and niche.
Fiction for young people and children continues to thrive, as does poetry, the latter largely through THWUP and fellow university publisher Auckland University Press, although the number of small poetry publishers keeps growing. More authors and publishers are doing audio versions first, and last year’s $500k funding to the Publishers Association of New Zealand has surely helped local audiobooks more generally.
Surprises in publishing this year? Perhaps Hira Nathan’s te reo gratitude journal Whakawhetai spending weeks in the bestsellers was one. The wild success of Monty Soutar’s visceral pre-colonial tale Kāwai: For Such a Time as This, now in its fourth reprint in paperback, was unexpected even by its publisher. The second of three, Tree of Nourishment, is coming next year.
What didn’t surprise? Prince Harry’s Spare (Greek title: Spare Wheel), which apparently sold six million copies in its first six months. Or The Bone Tree regularly topping weekly local fiction sales. The book got a good nudge from this magazine, but Ngarewa has been showing his class for some time.
Kiwis again added to their libraries of rugby books, this year in the shape of Dan Carter’s guide to success and Wayne Smith’s memoir. We continued to hand over cold hard Eftpos to find out how to jettison our bad behaviours (Atomic Habits) and care less about the unimportant stuff (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck).
The quantity and quality of local thrillers has exploded. As well as the likes of JP Pomare, Paul Cleave, Paddy Richardson and Vanda Symon, there’s a long list of excellent newbies.
The number of works by Māori and Pasifika, fiction and non-fiction, has also notably risen, often in te reo or bilingual.
Has there been a zeitgeisty theme in 2023? Perhaps walking the 3000km Cape Reinga to Bluff Te Araroa trail and writing a book about it. There were three this year: Tim Voors’ Not Alone, Victoria Bruce’s Adventures with Emilie and Tim Pankhurst’s Every Effing Inch. Relatedly, there seems to have been more local memoirs than ever, of the famous, the high-achieving and of ordinary folk. Teachers and vintners, book collectors, doctors, mountaineers. In the past 12 months, Wellington printer YourBooks produced more than 900 titles. This can be regarded as democratisation and a sidestepping of publishing’s notorious gatekeepers. But perhaps people really don’t need to write that memoir or that novel.
After much discontent, Creative NZ conducted a wide survey and announced a complete restructure of its funding model. It remains to be seen whether the clarity of its funding decisions improves and the revamp will actually be a boost on the ground for writers and artists.
NZ fiction still on the rise
If last year was a good one for NZ fiction, this year has been even better. Local fiction has grown close to 40% year on year, outperforming all other main sectors of the NZ books market, and locally published titles have seen less decline than the wider market. Sales of NZ fiction last year had jumped by more than 20% over the previous year, and a whopping 125% in genre fiction.
NZ fiction was the only category to show value growth, the other main categories seeing declines. Local fiction now holds a 7% share of all fiction sales. If this sounds low, in 2022 it was 5%, building on the back of positive growth in 2021, according to Nielsen BookScan. Perhaps better sales for fiction are a response to more difficult economic and political times. Or perhaps the broadening character of our fiction is enticing more readers. It’s sobering to note that across the Tasman, Australian fiction is closer to a third of the overall fiction market.
The overall picture for NZ-published titles is positive, increasing their share of all value sales to nearly 19% of the market. But this is against an annual total market decline – nearly 7% in volume. NZ non-fiction and YA/children’s had very modest growth. Inflation meant local book prices were up by about 3%.
What types of books saw good growth this year? Local genre fiction – defined as largely romance, thrillers, historical and speculative fiction – which grew 125% year on year in 2022, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, dipped this year, by nearly 40%. General fiction, by comparison, which is everything else and generally contemporary, grew by nearly 115%. The top local authors were Eleanor Catton, Catherine Chidgey, Nicky Pellegrino and Josie Shapiro.
Fact-based titles such as The Dressmaker and the Hidden Soldier and Gangster’s Paradise did well, while sales in NZ reference books, mind-body-spirit – many of these titles related to Māori language and culture – and the tiny but steadily growing category of local graphic novels rose by between 20-40%.
Unsurprisingly as we again settled into taking trips, atlases, maps and travel sold in larger numbers, growth hitting 26%, after a steady and predictable decline through the pandemic. Fields that saw drops of more than 20% were religion, politics and government.
Which NZ titles did best overall? Eleanor Catton’s third novel, Birnam Wood, released in February, has sold more than 10,000 copies, its rivals being several thousand behind (though, of course, Hinemoa Elder’s Aroha has sold thousands more than most over its three years in print). Bringing up the top 10 were Hira Nathan’s Whakawhetai: Gratitude journal, Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival, Elder’s Wawata, Dan Carter’s Art of Winning and Catherine Robertson’s kids’ book Pearl in a Whirl. If Sam Neill’s memoir had been published here rather than Australia, it would have come in at No 2. For a change, there were no cookbooks in the top 10.
The top five authors overall, comparing total sales across their many titles, were Colleen Hoover (50 titles) and Lucinda Riley, along with three overseas-based children’s authors. Lynley Dodd (89 titles), Craig Smith and Donovan Bixley were in the local top five, alongside Eleanor Catton and Hinemoa Elder.
Top five local titles for 2023
1. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (THWUP)
2. Second Chance by Hayley Holt (HarperCollins)
3. Straight up by Ruby Tui (A&U)
4. Fungi by Liv Sissons (Penguin)
5. Aroha by Hinemoa Elder (Penguin)
Top five titles overall for 2023
1. Atlas by Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker (Panmacmillan)
2. Spare by Prince Harry (Penguin)
3. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (THWUP)
4. It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover (S&S)
5. Someone Else’s Shoes by Jojo Moyes (Penguin)
