‘We need more writers who can just remember', says Ockham-winning wahine professor

NZ Herald

15-05-2025

'It was certainly a surprise, I wasn't expecting anything quite like that,' she said.
'I felt greatly honoured, it was spontaneous Māori creativity, which I think we need a lot more of to heal the wounds and reset the world that we're currently attempting to live within.'
Category convenor Holly Walker said Hine Toa was a 'rich, stunningly evocative memoir that defies easy categorisation'.
2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
'As well as painting a vivid picture of Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku's early life, from her childhood on 'the pā' at Ōhinemutu to her many creative and academic achievements, it is also a fiery social and political history that chronicles the transformative second half of the 20th century in Aotearoa from a vital queer, Māori, feminist perspective.'
Awekōtuku said she felt it was vital for the next generation to have a sense of New Zealand's history, of 'what these islands used to be like before those realities completely disappear'.
'I am so concerned that the immediacy, and the instant gratification of contemporary cultural and social environments now and stimuli now, really focuses on the immediate and yet having reached this immediate we should know from where we come.'
'... We need more writers who can just remember and rejoice and reflect and actually share and in the process of a political memory or a personal memoir like Hine Toa we can start doing that work.'
Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art won the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction.
Twelve years in the making, the landmark 600-page volume is a sweeping survey of Māori art – from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary practice – by art historians Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) and Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou).
Judges praised the book as a 'visual tour de force of enduring significance'.
' Toi Te Mana is extensively researched and thoughtfully written, casting a wide, inclusive net. The result is a beautifully designed visual tour de force, and a cultural framework that approaches toi mahi with intelligence and insight.'
Wellington professor and author Damien Wilkins won the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for his novel Delirious, described by judges as 'intimate, funny, honest' and 'unforgettable'.
'With a gift for crisp, emotionally rich digression, Damien Wilkins immerses readers in Mary and Pete's grapples with ageing and their contemplations of lost loved ones who still thrive in vivid memories.'
Wilkins, now director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, first took the fiction award in 1994 with The Miserables. He was a runner-up in 2001 for Nineteen Windows Under Ash and again in 2007 for The Fainter.
He nearly didn't make it on stage to bag his latest prize.
'I was delayed getting out of Wellington – there were plane problems. I boarded my flight at 7pm, which was the start time of the ceremony so I was racing against the clock to get there,' Wilkins told Morning Report today.
'I was picked up by a very kind festival driver at the airport, rushed through Auckland streets, she had permission to exceed the speed limit and pay the fines and I ran on stage at the last possible second to hear that I won.
'It was pretty dramatic and James Bond-like.'
Editor, novelist and poet Emma Neale won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry for her collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit.
Poetry category convenor David Eggleton said the collection displayed 'an exceptional ability to turn confessional anecdotes into quicksilvery flashes of insight'.
'It's a book about fibs and fables; and telling true stories which are perceived by others as tall stories; and the knock-on or flow-on effects of distrust, the scales dropping from one's eyes. It's about power and a sense of powerlessness; it's about belief and the loss of belief, it's about trust and disillusion; it's about disenchantment with fairytales. It's about compassion.'
The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction winner was presented with $65,000. The Poetry, Illustrated Non-Fiction, General Non-Fiction award recipients were each presented with $12,000.
Four Best First Book awards were also presented at the ceremony, with winners receiving $3000 each and a 12-month membership subscription to the New Zealand Society of Authors.
Full list of Ockham winners and finalists:
Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction won by Delirious, Damien Wilkins, Te Herenga Waka University Press.
Shortlisted: At the Grand Glacier Hotel, Laurence Fearnley, Penguin, Penguin Random House; Pretty Ugly, Kirsty Gunn, Otago University Press; The Mires, Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā), Ultimo Press.
Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry won by Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Emma Neale, Otago University Press.
Shortlisted: Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka, Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu), Auckland University Press; In the Half Light of a Dying Day, C.K. Stead, Auckland University Press; Slender Volumes, Richard von Sturmer, Spoor Books.
BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction won by Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) and Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī), Auckland University Press.
Shortlisted: Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist, Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson, Massey University Press; Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer, Athol McCredie, Te Papa Press; Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa, Matiu Baker (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Whakaue), Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice, Te Papa Press.
General Non-Fiction Award won by Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato), HarperCollins Publishers Aotearoa New Zealand.
Shortlisted: Bad Archive, Flora Feltham, Te Herenga Waka University Press; The Chthonic Cycle, Una Cruickshank, Te Herenga Waka University Press; The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation, Richard Shaw, Massey University Press.