13-05-2025
Ockhams: oldest writer ever to make shortlist
At 92, CK Stead is the oldest writer to ever contest a prize at the national book awards – probably. I think so anyway. His collection In The Half Light of a Dying Day is shortlisted for the $12,000 poetry prize awarded tomorrow night (Wednesday, May 14) at the Ockham awards.
No one quite as ancient as the sage of Parnell is leaping out, to borrow an inappropriately physical metaphor, in the records of past winners dating back to 1968. The closest in age appears to be his great friend and neighbour, Allen Curnow. He was 90 when he won the poetry prize for The Bells of Saint Babel's in 2001. He died that same year. The longevity of poets; Stead still swims out regularly to a buoy at Kohimarama in Auckland, still reads and writes and thinks.
I asked him for a comment. He emailed, 'Literary prizes are commercially inevitable, nice if you win, but largely a nonsense. Athletics are better. If you win even by only 100th of a second, still you have won. Literary preferences can only be confirmed by Judge Time, and even she can be challenged.
'I've often been relieved to find one of my books not on the long list, because it means I'm not in the spotlight. The worst is to be on the longlist and go no further. I've had that – I think I've had every possibility…I think the prize that pleased me most here was the Sarah Broom Prize for Poetry because it commemorates such a fine poet who died young.'
Stead won that prize in 2014. He told Stuff, 'It's reassuring at my age to be told that you are still in business.'
Eleven years on, and he is still very much in business; his shortlisting for In The Half Light of a Dying Day marks the fifth decade he has been up for a national award, after being judged third place in the 1972 book awards for his novel Smith's Dream, winning the poetry prize in 1976 for Quesada, winning the fiction prize in 1985 for All Visitors Ashore, winning the fiction prize again, in 1995, for The Singing Whakapapa, and winning the anthology prize for his Collected Poems in 2009.
He is shortlisted for this year's poetry prize alongside Emma Neale, Robert Sullivan, and Richard von Sturmer. Anna Jackson has described In The Half Light of a Dying Day as 'a late masterpiece'; her compliment seems entirely apt.
The Silence
In the undertaker's parlour
today Catullus
you wore your new hearing aids
to listen
beside finely refurbished Kezia
to the Silence.
She lay there
in her plain wood coffin
no more serious than you
but focussed
wearing that dark grey skirt we'd chosen,
red-brown silk scarf,
black trousers and black-shined shoes
so small they touched the heart.
Not a pin was dropped,
not a tear fell:
you and she Catullus
were elsewhere, otherwhere
nowhere.
'The Silence' is taken with kind permission from In The Half Light of a Dying Day by CK Stead (Auckland University Press, $25), shortlisted for the poetry prize at the 2025 Ockhams, and available in bookstores nationwide. The book is a sequence of poems leading to the death of the author's wife, Kay, in August 2023. All the poems were written in that year of illness and grief.
