Who’s in and who’s out? Who’s up for this year’s $65,000 stash of cash to be handed to the winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction on May 14?
The longlists of the Ockham NZ Book Awards have been made known, so we can reveal our delight at the brilliant acumen of the judges in celebrating our best books and gripe at the gems that have been cruelly and unaccountably omitted.
Good to see the likes of Delirious, by Damien Wilkins, Kataraina, by Becky Manawatu, The Royal Free, by Carl Shuker, The Mires, by Tina Makereti, and Kirsty Gunn’s Pretty Ugly make the cut for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. These are our brightest fiction stars, and one is highly likely to take out the Acorn.
It’s a pity, though, that there was no space for books like Romesh Dissanayake’s When I Open the Shop, a wry, quirky debut about food, grief and Wellington, Tina Shaw’s well-received dementia tale, A House Built on Sand, or Short Stories, from the peerless Owen Marshall.
Saraid de Silva’s Amma and Michelle Rahurahu’s Poorhara will fight it out in the category for best debut.
In the General Non Fiction category, 13 titles are longlisted. It’s cheering to see three essay collections in the list, including two debuts. The form is in the ascendance, and Airini Beautrais’s The Beautiful Afternoon and first-timers Flora Feltham’s Bad Archive and Una Cruickshank’s The Chthonic Cycle all push the boat out in terms of what essays can be about and how they are told. As does Peter Walker’s Hard By The Cloud House, a rumination about NZ’s extinct giant eagle.
This seems the most even category, with none of the baker’s dozen standing clear above the others.
If some were expecting Talia Marshall’s memoir Whaea Blue, it was not entered, for some reason, and The Last Secret Agent, by Pippa Latour and Jude Dobson, wasn’t eligible because Latour sadly died, aged 102, before the manuscript was submitted.
What missed out? David Coventry’s Performance, billed as a novel but unarguably ambitious “creative non-fiction” about his experience of the debilitating disease ME. The wartime biographies Frontline Surgeon and Grid also were passed by, as were Lily, Oh Lily, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s industrious pursuit of his Nazi-adjacent great-aunt, and First Things, the early-life memoir of poet and academic Harry Ricketts.
Unleave-outable in the longlist for the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction were Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, and Te Ata o Tū: The Shadow of Tūmatauenga, The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa, both generously praised in these pages. Likewise, a survey of artist Edith Collier, and the society-revealing photos of A Different Light and Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer.
But in this category of celebrating beautifully illustrated books, it seems odd to have included two officially commissioned works, in Force of Nature and Golden Enterprise, and the likeable bushman’s tales of Sam the Trap Man, but not Shaun Barnett’s knockout images of the country’s backcountry in A Wild Life, or Modern Women, a superior survey of modernist art by women.
The Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry longlist recognises some excellent collections, including Robert Sullivan’s Hopurangi–Songcatcher, Emma Neale’s Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Tracey Slaughter’s The Girls in the Red House are Singing and Richard von Sturmer’s Slender Volumes. But there was no room at the inn for Majella Cullinane’s Meantime (Listener: “authentic, engaging”), Stacey Teague’s Plastic, or Still Is, the last collection from Vincent O’Sullivan, one of the finest poets this country has produced.
Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction
(* = debut author)
All That We Know, by Shilo Kino (Moa Press)
Amma, by Saraid de Silva (Moa Press)*
Ash, by Louise Wallace (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
At the Grand Glacier Hotel, by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, Penguin Random House)
Delirious, by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Kataraina, by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press)
Poorhara, by Michelle Rahurahu (Te Herenga Waka University Press)*
Pretty Ugly, by Kirsty Gunn (Otago University Press)
The Mires, by Tina Makereti (Ultimo Press)
The Royal Free, by Carl Shuker (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
General Non-Fiction Award
Bad Archive, by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press)*
Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand, by Michael Belgrave (Massey University Press)
Feijoa: A Story of Obsession & Belonging, by Kate Evans (Moa Press)*
Hard by the Cloud House, by Peter Walker (Massey University Press)
Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery, by Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) (HarperCollins Publishers Aotearoa New Zealand)
Kahurangi: The Nature of Kahurangi National Park and Northwest Nelson, by Dave Hansford (Potton & Burton)
The Beautiful Afternoon, by Airini Beautrais (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
The Chthonic Cycle, by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka University Press)*
The Invasion of Waikato Te Riri ki Tainui, by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books)
The Mermaid Chronicles: A Midlife Mer-moir, by Megan Dunn (Penguin)
The Twisted Chain, by Jason Gurney (Otago University Press)*
The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation, by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press)
Unreel: A Life in Review, by Diana Wichtel (Penguin)
BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction
A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa, by Catherine Hammond and Shaun Higgins (Auckland University Press)
Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist, by Jill Trevelyan et al (Massey University Press)
Fenoga Tāoga Niue I Aotearoa: Niue Heritage Journey in Aotearoa, by Molima Nolly Pihigia et al (Mafola Press)
Force of Nature Te Aumangea o Te Ao Tūroa: A Conservation History of Forest & Bird 1923-2023, by David Young and Naomi Arnold (Potton & Burton)
Golden Enterprise: New Zealand Chinese Merchants 1860s to 1970s, by Phoebe H Li (Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust)
Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer, by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press)
Sam the Trap Man: Cracking Yarns and Tall Tales from the Bush, by Sam Gibson (Allen & Unwin New Zealand)*
Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa, by Kirsty Baker (AUP)*
Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa, by Matiu Baker et al (Te Papa Press)
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (AUP)
Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, by Lee Murray (The Cuba Press)
Hibiscus Tart, by Carin Smeaton (Titus Books)
Hopurangi / Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka, by Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press)
In the Half Light of a Dying Day, by CK Stead (Auckland University Press)
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, by Emma Neale (Otago University Press)
Manuali’i, by Rex Letoa Paget (Saufo’i Press)*
/Slanted, by Alison Glenny (Compound Press)
Slender Volumes, by Richard von Sturmer (Spoor Books)
Slim Volume, by James Brown (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
The Girls in the Red House are Singing, by Tracey Slaughter (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
