14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Dunedin author wins top award for her poetry
Emma Neale. Photo: supplied
A Dunedin author has been honoured at the country's biggest literary arts awards.
Editor, novelist and poet Emma Neale won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry for her collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in Auckland last night.
Poetry category convener of judges David Eggleton said the collection of poems displayed an exceptional ability to turn confessional anecdotes into "quicksilvery flashes of insight".
"Emma Neale is a writer fantastically sensitive to figurative language and its possibilities," he said.
Her book was about fibs, fables and telling true stories, which were perceived by others as tall stories and the knock-on or flow-on effects of distrust — the scales dropping from one's eyes.
Mr Eggleton said it was about power and a sense of powerlessness, belief and the loss of belief, about trust and disillusion, disenchantment with fairytales and compassion.
The book, published by the Otago University Press, was nominated for the award alongside Hopurangi — Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka, by Robert Sullivan; In the Half Light of a Dying Day, by C.K. Stead; and Slender Volumes, by Richard von Sturmer.
Neale had told the Otago Daily Times being shortlisted felt like an award in itself, feeling that the judges had read her work and seen merit in it was "really, really gratifying". — APL
