13-05-2025
Ockhams: in Emily's footsteps
The biggest night of the year in New Zealand literature is set to take place. Last year Emily Perkins waltzed off the Ockham book awards stage with $64,000 in her purse. Tonight, at around 9.30pm, one of four shortlisted authors will follow her as the 2025 winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and pocket $65,000. It will be the final grand announcement of the awards, following prizes of $12,000 to winners of nonfiction, illustrated nonfiction and poetry.
It takes place at the Aotea Centre in Auckland. Miriamo Kamo will act as MC. She received online criticism on Monday for her alleged mispronunciation of Chinese names as MC at this weekend's Barfoot & Thompson real estate awards but perhaps that was a mischievous attack and in any case no Chinese names are shortlisted for the Ockhams, only 19 European, eight Māori and one Pasifika. They make up a very wide range of authors – quite young, very old, some talented – who are in line for a shot of money and recognition for their hard work and brilliant ideas.
I have made my feelings clear about who I hope wins the fiction prize and nonfiction prize, but recuse myself from chiming in with my five cents' worth about the poetry prize on account of the fact I am friends and allies with all four shortlisted writers, and have no opinion on the illustrated non-fiction prize. Anyway, and as ever, who cares what I think; it's the night of the judges, of their whims and tastes and reckonings; and alongside the shortlisted authors, and their publishers and editors and designers and proofreaders, the judges, too, ought to be thanked for their time and commitment. They don't earn a fortune for all their reading but they take the job seriously.
The sponsors also deserve special cheers. The New Zealand book trade is in a bit of a slump. Bookstore sales are slow. Funding is increasingly difficult. Publishers – everyone remembers the day of the long knives at Penguin last year – are vulnerable. Huzzah, then, to the continued and positive support of Ockham (this marks their 10th year as principal backer) and the other sponsors at the national book awards: Creative New Zealand, the Acorn Foundation (via the late Jann Medlicott, who guaranteed her support of the fiction award in perpetuity), Peter and Marry Biggsy, Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand, e-commerce quango BookHub, and The Mātātuhi Foundation.
But nothing happens without the writers. It all starts with their decision to write, their faith and wit and delusion and stamina and resolve. Congratulations are due to all the authors of the 16 shortlisted titles.
The fiction prize is contested by Damien Wilkins, author of my favourite book of any kind in 2024, Delirious, a beautiful novel about old age; Kirsty Gunn's book of short stories Pretty Ugly (which includes her dark masterpiece 'All Gone', by far the most disturbing story to have ever appeared in ReadingRoom); and The Mires by Tina Makereti and At the Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley.
To nonfiction. Two books of essays that I didn't read, The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank and Bad Archive by Flora Feltham, will compete with Richard Shaw's excellent book The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation and my favourite, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku's memoir Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery, published by HarperCollins and one of the chief reasons I named them publisher of the year at the 2024 ReadingRoom awards.
The four very, very good collections shortlisted for the poetry prize are Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka by the nicest man in New Zealand letters, Robert Sullivan; Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale, who has just finished editing my next book and was a total delight to work with; In the Half Light of a Dying Day by my amigo CK Stead; and Slender Volumes by the fabulous Richard von Sturmer.
There are good pictures and some interesting text in the four books up for the illustrated nonfiction award, Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer and Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections.
ReadingRoom will magically reappear this evening at about 9:31pm with commentary on the winners.
