Latest news with #Ockham
Newsroom
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
An unfortunately brief encounter with Damien Wilkins
I interviewed Damien Wilkins for an hour the morning after his beautiful novel Delirious won the $65,000 fiction prize at the Ockham book awards last Wednesday night in Auckland, but the tape recording went awry and only kept the opening question and answer, and another question and answer around about 40 minutes later. This was most unfortunate and has left an elliptical transcript of our interview which reads like a man wandering into a room at random intervals to make interesting remarks, and then taking his leave. We met at the Sky City Hotel, where guests of the Auckland Writers Festival are given lodgings. He is 61 years old and moves with the languid, physical grace that in his teens made him a promising footballer with the wonderfully named club Stop Out. He was dressed in jeans slung low on his slender hips and a striped buttoned shirt. He has blue eyes which shyly peep out beneath low eyelids with a kind of melancholy. But he has a boyish smile which he will likely never grow out of. He spoke at length and with considerable charm. As director of the IIML writing school at Victoria University, he is one of the most well-liked figures in New Zealand literature, a calming and generous influence in the lives of hundreds of students. He was raised in Woburn, in Lower Hutt, as one of seven children who had the run of a large house. He said that his father, a mountaineer soon to reach 100, was like the eighth child, and told a story about how his Dad would take turns with the kids to lick the pudding bowl. His mother has dementia in a nursing home. She is a model for one of his characters in Delirious, and he also drew on the death of his sister Miriam. The book has tragedy in it – the pages inhabit a particular quietness of grief when the protagonists, Pete and Mary, are taken to identify the body of their young son – but it's also very funny, and expertly crafted. He worked on it for about three years and had a hot streak when he wrote a lot of it in three months. 'Thank you so much,' he said to the woman who passed by after cleaning his room. We conducted the interview on furniture at the end of a carpeted corridor. Wilkins lounged on a sofa and I sat at his feet on a kind of pouffe. Wellington author Noelle McCarthy also passed by; she spied my copy of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Series 1, the model I used for my questioning of Wilkins, and enthused, 'Oh! How great! I can't wait to read your talk with Damien!' The two remaining fragments may allow some insight into the writing practice of the winner of the richest prize in New Zealand literature. I recently interviewed Catherine Chidgey on the craft of fiction, and she described this kind of obsessive mathematic of writing 400 words a day, every day for 18 months. I wondered whether the oxen of your work also strained under such an exhausting yoke. They do not. They do not. I have never been a writer with a certain productivity in mind. And if I look back on some of my books, I'm a bit horrified by the erratic pattern of my production model. I mean, there's no pattern. There's nothing. It's just an enthusiasm which lasts for about, you know, six months and might go away for a bit and then return. And I've never held to a word count every day, even though I tell my students this is what you should do. I do believe in word count as a thing to help you through, because it's compounding interest. Four hundred words is not 400 words. It's actually 800 words because by writing 400 words, you've written the beginnings of another 400 words by your choices you made in those 400 words. So the compounding interest idea of fiction, I totally believe that. But I've just never been able to have the kind of Maurice Gee or Catherine Chidgey discipline of sitting down every day to write. It's just so boring. I just can't bear to. Delirious is his 11th novel. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, and an essay published in 2002 by Four Winds Press, When Famous People Come To Town, that was at once intellectually exhilarating and a comedy routine of one hilarious zinger after another. It was on the strength of the essay that I declared in the Listener magazine, 'Damien Wilkins is unable to write a bad sentence.' I hold to this conviction. His style has been used against him by critics who are suspicious that it implies a lack of substance. Dunedin author Breton Dukes laid waste to this fallacy in his Landfall review of Delirious. 'Wilkins gets called a clever writer. He's a good educator, he's brilliant at craft, so the nonsense conclusion is that he can't also possess emotional force. He's incredibly eloquent and funny in a knowing way, so maybe also he's too neat, with the haircut, those muted tones of his slim-fitting cardigans? But—he always delivers power. See his YA book Aspiring. See Max Gate, his marvellous book about Thomas Hardy. However, I think Delirious hits hardest.' What are the responsibilities of using the stories or lives of others? Well, the first call you've got to make is can you do it. And I think I struggle with this a little bit with the writers that come through the IIML. Their worry is, 'Oh, I can't do that.' I say to them, 'Well, you haven't done it yet. Can you do it? And then we'll decide whether it's actually got to where it's even alive.' I think there's a bit of a cart before the horse thing at that point. You know, I want writers to approach material that they might feel hesitant about, write it, and then we can think about it rather than decide, 'Oh yeah, it's inappropriate for you to take on that material', or 'You shouldn't because it's going to make you feel bad, or it's going to make your mother feel bad.' We don't know whether your mother is going to feel bad if it's actually alive as a piece of writing. Your mother might be very proud, happy. So that's the first thing you've got to get over. And I think that's a live question for every writer. You know, 'Can I touch this?' My mother is still alive and she's in the dementia ward, so the question was, 'Is it right to write now?' Because surely the writer waits until someone's died. There's an end to it. But what I was curious about is not the end, but the ongoingness of it. So that's how I rationalise it for myself. The ongoingness of our mother's condition and the kind of weird ways in which she's been reinvented as a person. That was the story for me, not the idea of a terminus, that it's all finished. So drawing the emotional resonance for me was the ongoingness of it, which kind of chimed for me with Pete and Mary's story of their relationship to the life and death of their son. The idea that you might put away a trauma in a certain drawer and then someone somehow would open it or really you hadn't put it away at all. And so the responsibility is that you have to do it well, that the language has to be good, that you have to do it with precision and enough detail to make that alive for readers. You know, I could never write this as a memoir. I could never imagine trying to do it. I would feel extremely strange and uncomfortable about sort of writing it as 'I', you know, like, 'I walk into the room and I see my sister.' That for me would feel very hard. It's just not the way I'm built as a writer to then convert those sort of conversations into straight memoir. I need to displace it. I need to give it to someone else. I need to give it to characters. * He said the essential thing in any story are the characters. He said he never wrote anything in longhand. He said he did not take notes or rely on a chart. He likened his writing process to drawing things out of a container; I asked if he saw it as a shipping container, something immense and heavy, but he said he always had in mind an oval bowl, something slippery and smooth. Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) was named the ReadingRoom literary awards of 2024 as Best Novel as well as Best Book of any kind, and won the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham national book awards on May 14. It is available in bookstores nationwide.
Scoop
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Lit Whanganui Festival Lands Two Major Winners
Lit Whanganui is thrilled to announce that two major prizewinners from this week's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku and Damien Wilkins – will be speaking at Whanganui's booklovers' festival which is set to run from 19-21 September. Lit Whanganui chair Karen White says this is a major coup for the festival. 'We knew we were onto a good thing when we made our author selection and it is wonderful to have this confirmed with not one but two Ockham winners speaking at Whanganui's booklovers' festival this year. 'The Ockhams are New Zealand's top book awards — the literary equivalent of the Oscars — so it's a huge deal to have these two celebrated authors headlining our festival.' White says this is just the beginning with a further eight acclaimed speakers who will be appearing at Lit Whanganui to be announced over several weeks in June, and the full programme of events released in July. 'We can assure you that we have some exciting surprises in store,' says White. 'There's a fantastic mix of voices and genres — something for every kind of booklover — as well as some interesting events in the pipeline.' She says people can keep up-to-date with festival announcements by signing up for the Lit Whanganui e-newsletter at and following Lit Whanganui on Facebook and Instagram. 'Out-of-towners take note, this is the perfect excuse to start planning a weekend escape to one of New Zealand's most creative and culturally rich cities,' White says. 'With numerous literary festival events hosted at the iconic Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery, it's also a great opportunity to explore this stunning gallery which has recently reopened after a major redevelopment and to soak up the charms of Whanganui's heritage and cultural precinct with Whanganui Regional Museum nearby.' Hine Toa by Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku Curator, critic and activist Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku won the General Non-Fiction award for her captivating memoir, Hine Toa, published by HarperCollins. 'Remarkable. At once heartbreaking and triumphant.' – Patricia Grace 'Extraordinary, vivid, riveting. I learned, I laughed and I wept over this book.' – Dame Fiona Kidman 'Brilliant. This timely coming-of-age memoir by an iconic activist will rouse the rebel in us all. I loved it.' – Tina Makereti Delirious by Damien Wilkins Damien Wilkins, director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for his novel about families and ageing, Delirious, published by Te Herenga Waka Press. 'A New Zealand novel of grace and humanity. How does Wilkins do it? These are flawed and immensely satisfying characters – you close your eyes at the faulty, circuitous routes they take. Delirious is a marvel of a book.' – Witi Ihimaera ' Delirious by Damien Wilkins is a beautiful work of fiction and if it reduces you to tears then you will not be alone. . . . The book of the year is all heart.' – Steve Braunias, Newsroom 'Funny, sharp, sad and profound, Delirious made me laugh, think, weep and actually beat my breast. A masterpiece.' – Elizabeth Knox, The Conversation
The Spinoff
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
An interview with Damien Wilkins the morning after winning at the Ockhams
Claire Mabey talks to Damien Wilkins about the drama of the night and what it means to have won. Delirious is a profoundly moving book. It's about an ageing couple – Pete and Mary – who are working out how to do the next and last phase of their lives. The narrative shifts between their past and present and centres around the nightmare of losing their only son, Will, when he was just a boy. At last night's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Wilkins arrived to the theatre just in time to give his acceptance speech. It was a tense night, Wilkins appearing like James Bond on the stage, late yet so smooth. In this interview we discuss what the award means, and what source material he used to create the world of Delirious. Claire Mabey: Good Morning. How are you feeling? Damien Wilkins: Still buzzing. It's all pretty overwhelming and strange. The amateur dramatics of it kind of overtook, I guess, the emotional impact of it in a funny way. The whole delays in the flights. The would I wouldn't I appear. I haven't really focused on what it all kind of means because it was all about the mechanics of getting here. CM: It was one of the most thrilling Ockham ceremonies that I remember, and lots of people at the party afterwards said the same thing. Just to recap for the readers: your flight was delayed in Wellington. You eventually got on another Air New Zealand flight and then had to track your way through Auckland in a festival car, racing to try and get to the Aotea Centre before the night ended. At what point did you realise that there was a particular urgency around the fact people really wanted you in the room? DW: Probably about halfway in that car journey. When I got in the car, I thought they're just wanting the full complement of people there. And that they were hoping to get me there in time for the reading. But then there was a funny exchange where Gillian, who was driving for the festival, was in touch with someone who said she had permission to exceed the speed limit, we'll pay the fines. Gillian said, 'Oh, my uncle's a rally driver, so we'll just channel him.' She didn't drive dangerously, but she was flashing lights to ask if she could pass them. It was like being in a weird cavalcade and at every moment there was some bizarre thing. Like getting off the plane I was at the back and they spent seven minutes trying to attach the rear door stairs. A tunnel was closed, there were roadworks. Every moment was extended. It was like being in a cosmic joke about someone who can't get to a thing, like being in a dream. Gillian was in constant contact with the organisers, letting them know how far away I was. Eventually we just slammed on the brakes, pulled around into the car park, and basically I ran on. In a way it relieved me of that anxiety about being in an auditorium and not being able to use your body; how you're frozen there waiting. CM: Your speech was remarkably calm and together. You said at the end a line about about being a pickpocket and a thief. I wondered what you did steal to make the novel? DW: The details of people's lives. My sister's last months. The character Claire, who's Mary's sister [in Delirious]: what happens to Claire is pretty much what happened to my sister, Miriam. Obviously things are choreographed differently: that wasn't her situation in terms of her family or anything like that. But without Miriam and us going through that, it doesn't exist. And then my mother's track through delirium and then through dementia. Novelists can be pretty ruthless about what we, let's face it, steal from life, but we are part of that life. The book is not a memoir, it's a version of life that allows that stuff to be released into a different atmosphere, in a different world, and maybe that's quite good for the writer, rather than to treat it as a memoir, where you're maybe still stuck in that world. Maybe fiction allows us to recalibrate it, in a way. You're still using that basic, deep emotional landscape, but you found a different setting for it and different coordinates. And maybe that might help us change it and offer it to a reader who doesn't need to know my sister and or my mother. That's the thrill of it, when you realise that a scene you've written about actually makes an impact on a stranger, rather than on people you know. Good novels allow us to enter these lives in a way which hopefully lets the dignity of the source material still sit somewhere. But it's that strange area that fiction moves from a very private space into a public space. And I'm interested in the way that that works in writing. How do you start telling a scene which moves the reader from the facts of something to feeling? CM: Why was the death of a child something to explore? DW: I mean, I'm not sure. But one of the things that Fergus, my publisher, said to me was who might be impacted by this book or worried about it, just in my circle. We talked about my siblings. I'd given them the book to read before I put it out in the world. So my brother's son, my nephew, had a moment a number of years ago where he was in a life and death situation. It was just really hard. He recovered but the level of pain was just unbelievable. So maybe that was behind it. But I'd actually, until Fergus said that about who might be impacted, I'd never really considered that my brother would be affected by it. Will [the boy in the book] wasn't in any way connected with what happened to my nephew. My nephew has made a full recovery but there was just that sense of utter devastation that was looming for my brother and his his wife. So maybe that was behind it. I remember writing past that scene where Will's body is looked at. I didn't have it, I'd written past that and I looked back and thought no, they have to go. They have to see him. It seemed a dereliction of my duty not to have that scene. I did feel obliged to go back. CM: That's very brave. DW: No, not brave, Just necessary. CM: So the award that comes with $65,000 which we know, to a writer, is huge money. What does it mean for you? DW: Economically it's really useful. I can give some money to our daughter who had a root canal and now needs a crown. She can't afford that so it's nice I can help her out. I'm a bit torn about the extent to which it all sits with the winner. I do actually miss the runner up money; a more even division of the spoils. We've been selected in this kind of group and it would be really meaningful for everybody to have that little bit of money, rather than a winner takes all thing. I understand it in the sense that it makes a big splash in terms of media impact and generates good things for the ecosystem. But it's like gold, silver, bronze medal, isn't it? Except it's just gold. CM: You've seen big changes in the industry over your career and as director of the International Institute of Modern Letters. What are the most significant changes? DW: The makeup of MA classes. When Bill [Manhire] set it up in the late 90s, there were just 10 people selected, and that was from a pool of sometimes up to 90 or even 100 applicants. It was our subjective view of the very top of a very large, pretty strong pool – so lots of really good people missed out. And now, because we've got three workshops and 30 places it's allowed us to build classes that look different in terms of ethnicity and age. Our graduates are the walking adverts for the the programme so I think our name is better known among a broader group. There's also the long overdue feelings about representation and who gets to tell whose story? How do you manage kind of these kind of tricky ethical issues? That's a component now, as it should be. CM: What advice would you give your younger self – the same one that won this prize 30 years ago for The Miserables? DW: If you have early success your expectations tend to be out of whack with what the world is about to deliver. I remember, after 10 years of writing, that my sales were zero. And I really did think, why am I doing this? Even though The Miserables had won the award, been published in America, in the UK, then I had another two-book deal. But it was hard yakka. And my career didn't really develop in ways that I might have been dreaming about. So, as I say to my students, it's a long game. How do you maintain the kind of urgency around your own creative impulses against the economic tidal wave sweeping you out in another direction? You've got to work at that. I don't have any magic sort of formula. But what's exciting and interesting to me is that the desire to to write is undiminished. Every year I see a fresh lot of faces around our building, and I know that within those 30 people there are books waiting to be written. There are countless stories waiting to be told and that's the exciting thing. So rather than be depressed about careers that don't happen we focus on that sense of new promise. Most people come to a reckoning at some point. They go, how do I do it? How do I feed my family, feed myself and do this other deep thing I want to do? That's the gift of teaching writers, is that you see that renewed every year, and that gives me heart. And some of these students I've taught have shifted my sense of what I can do as well. I think of Breton Dukes, Pip Adam, Airini Beautrais: they're just suddenly pushing at barriers and pushing at form and and so you get this kind of jolt. There's no complacency here. There's a sense of new possibilities that other writers are seeing. It's not quite competitiveness, but it's certainly encouragement. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
Newsroom
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Wilkins flies in late to win Ockhams
High drama on Wednesday night at the Ockham national book awards as Damien Wilkins only just made it from Wellington to Auckland in time to be presented with $65,000 as the winner of the fiction prize. 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)
Newsroom
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
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.
