Ockham NZ Book Awards 2023 finalist booklet

Our Finest

The New Zealand Book Awards Trust Te Ohu Tiaki i Te Rau Hiringa is delighted to present the finalists in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Aotearoa’s premier literary honours.

This year’s awards received a record 191 entries, and we have great admiration for the 12 judges who took on the task of narrowing a very competitive field to a longlist of 44 announced in February, and now to the 16 deserving books they describe in this booklet. The fiction panel was joined at this stage by British writer, publisher and books podcaster, John Mitchinson.

The Trust remains so grateful to the partners who share our belief in the transformative power that literature and our writers have on the cultural landscape of Aotearoa, in particular enduring funder Creative New Zealand and our passionate naming-rights sponsor Ockham Residential. The visionary arts and literature benefactor Jann Medlicott died last year, and she will be greatly missed, but her generous legacy lives on in perpetuity through her fiction prize, administered by the Acorn Foundation. We welcome the Mātātuhi Foundation as funder of the Best First Book Awards, joining longstanding supporters Mary and Peter Biggs, Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand and the Auckland Writers Festival. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou.

And most importantly, whakamihi to all the authors whose inspired work has been recognised and honoured in this shortlist. We urge readers to seek out their titles in bookstores and libraries around the motu. You can join us to hear the finalists reading from their books, and to celebrate the ultimate winners, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre at Auckland’s Aotea Centre on Wednesday 17 May.

For more details and tickets visit www.writersfestival.co.nz.

#theockhams www.nzbookawards.nz

Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction

Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand

Nick Bollinger

Published by Auckland University Press

With its distinctive cover, bold typography and risograph hues on uncoated stock, this book demands to be read from page one. Weaving original sources into an engaging narrative, Nick Bollinger has crafted a considered and fitting history. Photographs from private collections add to its rich production, balancing text and illustration in ways that belie its size. Like the period it surveys, Jumping Sundays is a game-changer.

Robin White: Something is Happening Here

Edited by Sarah Farrar, Jill Trevelyan and Nina Tonga

Published by Te Papa Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

This is more than an exhibition turned art book. Stunning reproductions, historical essays and the insights of two dozen contributors do justice to the institution that is Robin White. As iconic screenprints flow seamlessly into large format barkcloth, White’s border-crossing practice is temporally divided with the savvy use of typographic spreads. Space, too, is given to the voices of her Kiribati, Fijian and Tongan collaborators. Strikingly elegant yet comprehensive, excellence is what’s happening here.

Secrets of the Sea: The Story of New Zealand’s Native Sea Creatures

Robert Vennell

Published by HarperCollins

Secrets of the Sea is a treasury of interesting facts, beautiful photography and remarkable prose. Beyond the luscious illustrations is a perfect blend of science, history and mātauranga Māori that gives the text depth and relevance and reveals in fascinating (and urgent) ways the interconnectedness of the human and extrahuman world. Visually compelling and hugely accessible, this impactful book will delight the marine biologist, sea aficionado and general reader alike.

Te Motunui Epa

Rachel Buchanan (Taranaki, Te Ātiawa)

Published by Bridget Williams Books

Innovative and immensely topical, Te Motunui Epa is a triumph of storytelling and a challenge to the confines of traditional historiography. Rachel Buchanan’s meticulous research and compelling writing is complemented by the very best in graphic design – from its light-catching cover to the black-bordered array of archival documents. Generous while unafraid to confront the colonial hurt at the heart of the story, this is a deceptively powerful and enduring work.

Judges: Jared Davidson (convenor), Anna-Marie White (Te Ātiawa), Stephen Stehlin

Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry

Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised

Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki)

Published by Auckland University Press

Alice Te Punga Somerville’s meticulously crafted collection resonates with aroha, wit, sadness and anger. Advice to “italicise all of the foreign words in her poems” becomes a catalyst to exploring the dynamics of racism, colonisation, and writing in English as a Māori writer. Poems float like gourds strung with musings and personal recounts. English words incline as foreign words, but te reo syllables evade linguistic ambushes, camouflaged soundscapes and erasure. They stand upright, mark Space-Time like pou.

People Person

Joanna Cho

Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Joanna Cho explores relationships, identity and survival with an aching, ironic honesty. A people person may have a name bought from a fortune-teller, drive battered cars, light up rooms with their hearts, or miss the smell of kawakawa ointment. Cho navigates expectations and choices in imagined and recalled stories, skilfully connecting folklore with autobiographical snapshots from South Korea and Aotearoa. Whimsical, surreal, magical and mundane elements meld and clash in poetic vignettes.

Sedition

Anahera Maire Gildea (Ngāti Tukorehe)

Published by Taraheke | Bush Lawyer

Sedition flows through generations of dis-ease, enlivens tongues stilled by loss and trauma, excavates a genealogy of resistance. It’s a contemplative, defiant collection that resists the commodification of culture and whenua, and the ongoing perversity of neo-colonialism.

Poems float upon the notion that we walk into the future facing our past, which embodies and shapes us. Anahera Maire Gildea agitates, untangles and reweaves threads of outrage, dystopia and anguish as she resolutely redraws detrimental power.

We’re All Made of Lightning

Khadro Mohamed

Published by We Are Babies Press, Tender Press

Khadro Mohamed’s elegiac collection features a speaker torn between multiple worlds. Pendulating from prose to lyric, it is a ghostly work in which dreams and memory bleed into each other, as do its places: Egypt, Somalia, Newtown and Kilbirnie. Even time becomes concurrent, and for Mohamed, the past is right there in the present. In this collision of languages and worlds, the possibility and impossibility of home is both grieved and celebrated.

Judges: Diane Brown (convenor), Serie Barford, Gregory Kan

Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

Better the Blood

Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue)

Published by Simon & Schuster

Michael Bennett’s finely tuned thriller opens with an historical atrocity before moving to a contemporary series of murders. Detective Hana Westerman is caught between being a good cop or a kupapa collaborator, and the cases become frighteningly personal. Excellently paced and populated by complex characters, this intricate novel centres on conflict between utu and on the aroha, hūmarie and manaaki needed to move forward.

Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant

Cristina Sanders

Published by The Cuba Press

Based on the true story of an 1866 shipwreck, this re-telling of the endurance of the survivors on a sub-Antarctic island is impeccably researched and peopled by rounded, realistic and complex characters. Dramatic and wellpaced, it is rich with vivid descriptions of sea, land and weather, and Cristina Sanders offers insight into the physical and psychological effects of being stranded in an inhospitable environment. Historical fiction at its best.

Kāwai: For Such a Time as This

Monty Soutar (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Ngāti Kahungunu)

Published by Bateman Books

In senior Māori historian Monty Soutar’s powerful novel we learn histories that transport us across place, time, and generations. We become wrapped in the passion and honour of a mid-18th century ao Māori. Tikanga and mātauranga Māori, rangatiratanga, and love for the whenua and the iwi immerse us; butchery, enslavement, and spiritual curses smash. Mana foments the fires of war. Can later generations reassert balance?

The Axeman’s Carnival

Catherine Chidgey

Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Catherine Chidgey’s novel is a rich mix of humour and tragedy, suspenseful, insightful and compelling. It’s a contemporary down-onthe-failing-farm tale with a highly inventive and entertaining twist: the narrator is a sentient magpie, Tama, who flies from its pages fully formed and loveable. The story unfolds with many laugh-aloud moments coupled with an overriding sense of dread. Chidgey’s writing is masterful, abounding with poetic language and intensely descriptive settings.

Judges: Stephanie Johnson (convenor), John Huria (Ngāi Tahu, Muaūpoko, Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō, Ngāti Rangi), Jemma Morrison

General Non-Fiction Award

A Fire in the Belly of Hineāmaru: A Collection of Narratives about Te Tai Tokerau Tūpuna

Melinda Webber (Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whakaue) and Te Kapua O’Connor (Ngāti Kurī, Pohūtiare)

Published by Auckland University Press

An exquisite and innovative book that uses a form of storytelling, pūrākau, to construct further stories that elucidate and challenge. It adds a layer of narrative truth to what we know about Te Tai Tokerau and, more importantly, shifts existing perceptions. It reveals the richness of knowledge in whakapapa which will spark significant personal and collective inspiration.

Grand: Becoming my Mother’s Daughter

Noelle McCarthy

Published by Penguin, Penguin Random House

This memoir presents both a woman confronting her own shame and the shame of generations with visceral honesty. It offers a treatise on forgiveness and a light of hope. Noelle McCarthy’s command of language imbues readers with sight, sound, smell and taste. It is complete as an individual narrative, while the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship and the weight that loads onto the process of knowing oneself offers much to our collective emotional intelligence.

Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay

Paul Diamond

(Ngāti Hauā, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi)

Published by Massey University Press

This beautifully produced and generous book is a fascinating account of an extraordinary moment in small-town colonial New Zealand with its vivid line-up of characters, a revenge plot, blackmail and local Pākehā political intrigue. Alongside gripping, skilled and elegant popular historical storytelling, readers will find well-researched and closely observed insights into aspects of our national character, and our struggles with social decency.

The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi

Ned Fletcher

Published by Bridget Williams Books

Ned Fletcher’s extensively researched and meticulously constructed book provides a valuable contribution to scholarship, history and law, and makes a timely and evolved interjection into the conversations of this country. Readers are led to evidenced conclusions via Fletcher’s clear hypotheses, structural commitment to reason and thorough examination of the characters and context involved in the creation of the English text of Aotearoa’s founding document.

Judges: Anna Rawhiti-Connell (convenor), Alison Jones, Te Maire Tau (Ngāi Tahu)

Proudly supporting

Home of Book Tokens — the perfect gift and the best reward.

VALE, JANN MEDLICOTT

One of the best things about being part of the Book Awards whānau is that we get to hobnob with the most luminous souls, good sorts like Whiti Hereaka, 2022 Ockhams champ, and the late, great Dr Jann Medlicott MNZM — radiologist, arts fan, literature lover, cat worshipper ... rocker of devilishly pink Doc Marten boots.

And most generous benefactor of the richest writing reward in all Aotearoa — the $64,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. What a legacy Jann has left — through the Acorn Foundation, her support of tomorrow’s Mansfields and Manhires, Grimshaws and Graces stretches out into the future as far as we can see.

Thank you — and fare thee well, wondrous woman!