Wilkins flies in late to win Ockhams
Delayed flights meant the Wellington writer had to literally run onto the stage at the Aotea Centre for the final announcement of the night at the Ockham awards held in the Aotea Centre. His novel Delirious won the fiction prize and $65,000.
In any case, righteousness and natural justice prevailed at the 2025 Ockham national book awards with the two best books published last year winning major awards: huzzah to Wilkins, and to Rotorua activist Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, who won the $12,000 nonfiction prize for her astounding memoir Hine Toa. Both books are destined to re-enter the bestseller charts like two blazing comets.
Other winners included Emma Neale, who won the $12,000 poetry prize for Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, and Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, authors of the winner of the $12,000 illustrated nonfiction prize, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art. Prize money of $3000 was also awarded to the winners of best first book. The full list appears at the end of this article.
The main spotlight belonged to Wilkins and his $65,000 windfall. It has been a long time between drinks: he won the fiction prize way back in 1994 for his debut novel The Miserables (recent inane review on GoodReads, by someone called Annie: 'Found it rather inaccessible, meandering, plotless and dry. Who gives out these literary awards anyway?') although he also won the prize for best YA novel for Aspiring at the 2020 children's book awards. Delirious may be his masterpiece, the book he was meant to write. It tells the story of a nice old couple who sell up their home and move to the arid lands of a retirement village. Pip Adam's review in ReadingRoom got it perfectly: 'At its heart it's a deeply affecting novel about the almost unbearable pains of being alive that are usually impossible for us to look at directly … It's an incredibly accomplished novel which demonstrates a deep and lived understanding of the ways we carry on while knowing what is coming for us at increasing speed the longer we live. In many ways this book destroyed me. It brought me to tears more than once, but it's a gift.'
Note the highly emotional response. It's also there in the recent review in Landfall, by Breton Dukes, who wrote, 'Like Damien, maybe you have had a sister die, or a mum go nutty … In Delirious, Wilkins disappears entirely and that's what makes it a great book; it's what makes a masterpiece—the absence of author, combined with riveting content, faultless craft and heart, heart, heart.'
If you have not read it already then you ought, ought, ought. Same goes for Hine Toa by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku. It's such a powerful book. (Congratulations, also, are due to HarperCollins, a commercial publisher which rarely features in the rarefied air of book awards; the commercially unpressured university presses picked up six of the eight Ockham awards on Wednesday. The other exception was Saufo'i Press, which published the winner of the best first book of poetry, Manuali'I by Rex Letoa Paget.) I expected Ngāhuia would write fascinating chapters on her involvement with emergent Māori rights group Ngā Tamatoa at Auckland University in the 1970s, and she did not disappoint. But she was just as compelling in her personal stories growing up in Rotorua and, later, realising she was lesbian. It's a sexy book. Hine Toa marks her second win at the national book awards, after winning the culture prize in 2008 as co-author of Mau Moko: The World of Māori Tattoo.
No surprises that Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis' Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous history of Māori art won the illustrated nonfiction prize. As Eva Corlett wrote in The Guardian, 'A landmark book celebrating Māori art has clocked up a couple of impressive firsts: not only is it the most comprehensive account of creative work by Indigenous New Zealanders ever published, it is also the first wide-ranging art history written entirely by Māori scholars.' It has since been published internationally, by the University of Chicago Press in the US and Australia. As for Emma Neale's prize-winning Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, it follows the possibly equal honour of being named by poetry czar Nick Ascroft in ReadingRoom as one of the best collections of 2024. 'A lot always happens in an Emma Neale poem,' wrote the czar. 'You are not left meandering imponderables. Each is told with her fluid grace.'
Nicely put; and indeed I saw Ascroft at the awards ceremony, drinking fluids with considerable grace. It was a good night. Arts minister Paul Goldsmith was there. Miriama Kamo was a gracious and regal MC. Huzzah, most of all, to the winners of the 2025 awards. They deserve their loot and more so they deserve the most important thing: to be read.
JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
GENERAL NONFICTION AWARD
Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins)
BOOKHUB AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATIVE NONFICTION
Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis (Auckland University Press)
MARY AND PETER BIGGSY PRIZE FOR POETRY
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale (Otago University Press)
HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST WORK OF FICTION
Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF POETRY
Manuali'I by Rex Letoa Paget (Saufo'i Press)
JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF ILLUSTRATED NONFICTION
Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker (Auckland University Press)
EH McCORMICK PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF GENERAL NONFICTION
The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
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Newsroom
2 days ago
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Authors call out Stanford's ‘racism'
Authors and key figures in New Zealand publishing have slammed government minister Erica Stanford's controversial decision to remove words in te reo Māori in new additions to a series of books used to teach five-year-olds to read. As reported by Radio New Zealand, a ministry document showed Stanford decided on the near-ban last October because she was worried five-year-olds would be confused by Māori words in the Education Ministry's Ready to Read Phonics Plus series. ReadingRoom reached out to 10 writers, publishers and booksellers for comment. Their response was not unanimous. Some were cautious in their replies, and some pointed to other, literacy-adjacent issues they felt were more important than the heat generated by an apparent culture war. But the majority felt plain disgusted. Catherine Chidgey has twice won the national fiction prize (The Wish Child in 2017, The Axeman's Carnival in 2023) and her latest novel The Book of Guilt has topped the number 1 position at the NielsenIQ BookScan bestseller chart for 14 weeks. She said, 'I'm appalled by Minister Stanford's decision to strip Māori words from children's books – a move cloaked in the spurious claim that it impedes English literacy, but reeking of racism and dragging us back to the 1950s. My own daughter has had no trouble reading and pronouncing both Māori and English in the same text, and this retrograde step is as needless as it is shameful.' Steph Matuku was a finalist at this week's New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for her YA novel Migration, a dystopian space odyssey set 3,000 years into our possible future. She said, 'You know that cartoon with the pirate telling the mermaid not to play the thing because he doesn't like it? 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'What I find astonishing is the sass of Erica Stanford's racism – I mean she's just so blatant with it. I guess that's what growing up on the North Shore does to you.' Rachael King is also a successful middle-grade writer. She referred ReadingRoom to her comments on Instagram: 'In New Zealand many Māori words are part of our lexicon and need to be taught just as much as English words FFS.' Shilo Kino has written fiction for kids and adults; her 2024 debut novel All That We Know was inspired by Māori and Pasifika students who held an Auckland schoolgirl to account for posing in blackface in a Snapchat photo. She said, 'Can I echo the words of Te Akatea, the Māori Principals' Association, associate president Bruce Jepson? 'It's an act of racism. It's a determined act to recolonise our education system, and it sends a very dangerous message and is immensely harmful and it's utterly shameful.' 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Newsroom
12-08-2025
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The Dr Timoti effect
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Otago Daily Times
01-08-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Aloud and in full colour
It might sound like Carol Hirschfeld but it's Shayne Carter's story, film-maker Margaret Gordon tells Tom McKinlay. In the opening frames of a new documentary, Shayne Carter walks along the Aramoana mole as if it were a runway. He's coming in to land, returning to Ōtepoti, back from the world. There he immediately meets the rough acclaim of the mole's resident seagulls - and curses right back. But it's an uneven contest, even for as practised a crowd wrangler as the Dunedin musician. No problem though, because the film jumps straight to Carter unleashed, wringing rawk high in feedback's most seaside registers from his leftie six string. Take that, you gulls. It's emblematic. As Life in One Chord chronicles, Carter seems to have had an answer always, to circumstance, to distance, to tragedy, to success. Life in One Chord is the work of journalist and documentary-maker Margaret Gordon - formerly of Christchurch, now of Melbourne - its title taken from the first vinyl release of Carter's very nearly all-conquering band Straitjacket Fits, a squalling '80s four-track EP that carried the propulsive She Speeds. This past week Gordon was applying the final touches to her film - crucially, making sure the sound mix does the material justice - ahead of its New Zealand International Film Festival release. The film's a musical biography, tracing Carter's trajectory from the hard-knock playgrounds of 1970s Brockville to the world stage and back again. It charts a course of approximate parallel to Carter's Ockham-winning memoir Dead People I Have Known, but welcomes in the perspectives of others involved in the various milieu that set him on his way or who travelled with him. And indeed, the book was part of her motivation for the film, Gordon says. "It really spoke to me, and I was like, it really needs to be painted in with all the bright colours, so when he talks about the bands or the people or the places that you can hear it and you can see it." So, alongside weaving in essential servings of Carter's rich songwriting catalogue - including some rare live footage - the film makes room for voices from his early life, home and school, and an extended cast of Dunedin Sound musicians. "The key people there would be John Collie, the drummer from Straitjacket Fits ... and also Natasha, Shayne's sister, which is important, because, you know, Shayne talks a lot about family," Gordon says. The film-maker's rule was that the people included had to be directly related to the story. The film follows Gordon's well received 2014 documentary Into the Void as another entry in the musical history of Te Waipounamu - the earlier documentary focused on the Christchurch band of the title. Music, bands, people interest her. "I think being in a band, it's a really ephemeral thing, isn't it?" she muses. "Like, it's very hard to exactly pinpoint what it is that makes it so special, but there is a certain kind of magic there that happens within that group of people and it's really the transmission of that through to the audience ... just that spark, in that moment, when that happens, where this group of people is doing something and this other group of people is there and they witness it and they feel it and they get engaged." So, not a straightforward phenomenon to distill, to capture, away from a gig's pulsing cacophony, but in her film, Gordon has a great ally. "Shayne's such a good talker," she says. "That was one of the things that I was really drawn to about him in terms of a documentary subject, you know, he has really great reflections on everything, really, and he has a lot of really great things to say, so that's really important. "He's a performer, too, and so that's really good. Like, it's not necessary, but it helps when you're making a documentary to be working with someone who's not afraid of a camera, someone who's OK to gather themselves together and put on a little bit of a show, which is most certainly what he did." Carter's on foot, in his own footsteps, through much of the film, from the mole to Brockville Rd, from his old high school to tracking down Straitjacket Fits' original broom cupboard George St practice room. It's a story of making your own fun. And Carter's created a lot of it. Still is in new and reinventing ways - he's now composing for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Gordon wasn't familiar with all of it when she started into the doco. She'd joined the Carter fandom from about the Straitjacket Fits, following it on to Dimmer, but was learning about his earlier output with Bored Games and Double Happys. The formative story of the former plays out at what was Kaikorai Valley High School, Carter trooping back despite some misgivings. But as Gordon tells it, his reception there also pushes out the margins of the story to include a community's pride in the boy who did good. "You know, he said before we went back, he was like, 'oh, I didn't really like high school that much. I don't know how this is going to go'. "We came in and then before we'd even got into the office, you know, the deputy principal, John Downes, came out ... and then a couple of other people came out and everybody came out welcoming Shayne - really loved to see him back there." That sort of slightly revisionist remembering - back in the day the school's then principal stormed out of Bored Games' abrasive punk-inspired school hall performances - is joined in conspiracy by a Dunedin caught at its blue sky best. There's no sense here of the cold, suffocating grey that those Dunedin bands of the 1980s were trying to mitigate. Gordon admits to being a little bit disappointed Dunedin didn't deliver on its meteorological reputation. "I was like, 'oh, OK, this is making it look really good. Is this true? Are we really telling a true story here with all the sunshine?'." There is, though, plenty of shade in the story. Grim reality foreshadowed in the title of Carter's memoir. Gordon had some difficult material to cover, requiring sensitive handling. A striking element in the film is the tight knit nature of the community involved in Carter's shared story. Among the most prominent players is his Double Happys partner in crime, Wayne Elsey - another preternaturally talented friend from school, who was there for the pre-teen hijinks that became teenage kicks and rock and roll. The Carter-Elsey chemistry meant the Double Happys seemed destined for the sort of success Straitjacket Fits later achieved, but Elsey died in a touring accident. Gordon says they thought long and hard about how to handle that tragedy, integrate it into the story arc. "Because his passing was so tragic, it's still felt very strongly, it's still very raw within that Dunedin community. So, whatever we did, we had to be really careful about it and respectful." She knew Carter was not going to talk about it in an interview so that responsibility was picked up by Collie - drummer in both Double Happys and Straitjacket Fits - who grew up a stone's throw from Elsey's childhood home. And if anything more was needed from Carter, he'd addressed that responsibility already in his song Randolph's Going Home, a rawly heartfelt remembering that is afforded generous space in the film. For all Carter's showman inclinations, Gordon says she knew he was not going to be offering unlimited access to his inner workings. "He has a lot of self-protection, and I think that, you know, I always knew that he wasn't going to do a big interview where he would reveal all. "That's really not what he's like, and I did know that going in." That contributed to her decision to use passages from Dead People I Have Known in the film. "It's all there. All of that stuff is very, very real and very raw in Shayne's own words." However, in a genius twist, those words are read into the documentary by Carol Hirschfeld, the broadcaster's honeyed tones mixing equal measures of her straight-faced professionalism with the double-take comedy of delivering the punk rocker protagonist's own words in the first person. There's more pathos to come, beyond Elsey's passing, as of the original four members of Straitjacket Fits there's only two still standing, Carter and Collie. Bassist David Wood died in 2010, followed 10 years later by the band's other songwriter, Andrew Brough. Brough left the band abruptly in the early '90s just as they were about to go stratospheric and, while he found further critical success with his band Bike, had largely retreated from the world by the time he died. As a result, Gordon's interview with him is particularly affecting, as the bitterness previously reported about his departure from the band appeared to have receded. "It was interesting, because he was a lot warmer about his time in the band and a lot more circumspect about the band's demise than I thought he would be," Gordon says. "I feel like he'd come to a point where he still had a bit of grievance, but overall he was pretty much, you know, had accepted that it was what it was. "I wouldn't want to say that he'd moved on, but he wasn't fretting about it any more, that's for sure." As the documentary does at various other points, Brough's story acknowledges the well-observed tensions at the heart of the music industry and the price to be paid. "The music industry is always a strange one because it's got this unhappy marriage between creativity and money," Gordon says. "And those two things just don't really work well together." A lot of Dunedin bands would have been through the same grinder, she says, having been identified by the industry as bankable propositions. "And then, you know, all of that kind of influence starts creeping in and things become very difficult. And I actually think that's an underlying theme of the film." Adversity, character and resilience are foregrounded again in a chapter on Carter's role in supporting Dunedin Sound progenitor Chris Knox, following his debilitating stroke, in which the Enemy and Toy Love frontman delivers his own lesson in gritty defiance. Knox's determination seems to hold up another mirror to Carter's doggedness. Gordon confirms that was the story she found, but it was also the story she chose to tell. "You could have made a documentary and not talked about that, but for me one of the big things about Shayne that's really important and that is potentially unusual is that he really is resilient and that he just keeps getting back up and getting back to work again. And even though he's had to deal with some of the most difficult things that you could possibly imagine, including, being in a band and touring the world and then coming back to Dunedin - I mean, that's going to be tough. "It'd be tough for anyone. Especially because, you know, I don't think New Zealand is very good at having much empathy for people in that situation." The standard antipodean advice to such vicissitudes, absent of much empathy, would be to "get over it". Yep, true, Gordon says. "But, you know, that's exactly actually what he does. And so, yes, that theme of resilience, it really was something that we wanted to tell because I think it's very central to Shayne's story. "He's a resilient guy and amongst all of this difficulty and tragedy, he just continues on. He's an artist. He stays on the path." While Gordon's film will initially screen at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and perhaps beyond that in a conventional cinema format, she has other plans for it. "We're going to regroup and create, like, a different version of the film that has more music in it and that will have live incidental music and that will tour more like a band." Music documentaries aren't always huge box office draws at the cinema, she says, and, in a lot of ways, Life in One Chord is quite niche. It is, to a significant extent, one for New Zealand about New Zealanders. "So, we always wanted to have another plan so the film could have a second life where it could travel to, like, music festivals and arts festivals and things like that." It would be a longer show, incorporating live music. It would be doing things differently, appropriately enough. "One of the things about Shayne, he was, is and remains a punk and likes to do things his own way," Gordon says in summary. "And that was the way we did the film - 'this is how it is and we're going to do it the way that we want to do it, we are going to do it ourselves, we're going to do it our own way'. And that's how it ended up." Life in One Chord screens as part of the NZ International Film Festival at the Regent Theatre, Dunedin on August 16 and 19.
