Ockham NZ Book Awards 2022 finalist booklet

Our Finest

The New Zealand Book Awards Trust takes enormous pleasure in presenting the 16 finalists in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, the country’s most prestigious awards for literature.

Narrowing down this year’s 160 entries from an extremely competitive field to a shortlist of 16 was a demanding task and we have great respect for our 12 local judges, whose names appear on each category page that follows, as do their comments on the finalists. The fiction panel was joined at this stage by American writer, editor and literary critic, John Freeman.

The Trust is so grateful to the organisations that continue to share our belief in the undeniable value of literature to Aotearoa.

Creative New Zealand remains our stalwart cornerstone funder, and we salute the vision and passion of our naming-rights sponsor, Ockham Residential.

This year we are delighted to welcome the Crystal Arts Trust as the funder of the four Best First Book Awards. The Trust joins longstanding supporters Jann Medlicott and the Acorn Foundation, Mary and Peter Biggs, Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Auckland Writers Festival. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou.

We congratulate all the authors whose work has been recognised and honoured. We encourage you to seek out their titles in bookstores and libraries countrywide, and to join us when we announce the ultimate winners on 11 May 2022. #theockhams

www.nzbookawards.nz

Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction

Dressed: Fashionable Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand 1840 to 1910 Claire Regnault Published by Te Papa Press This beautiful and beguiling book will seduce a wide audience with its stunning images and informative text, focusing on our ancestors’ lives through the lens of their clothing. Elegantly designed and sumptuously presented, it covers the diversity of sartorial experience in 19th Century Aotearoa as it addresses simple questions such as: Who made this garment?

Who wore it, and when?

A valuable addition to our nation’s story, it will have wide cultural and educational reach, and is an outstanding example of illustrated non-fiction publishing.

Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Lucy Mackintosh Published by Bridget Williams Books

A fresh and timely study that weaves multiple narratives across time and space into a highly readable story, revealing the deep histories and continuous remaking of selected landscapes across Tāmaki Makaurau.

The clean presentation of both often startling historic images and contemporary photography, and the skilfully written text informed by serious scholarship, fill some of the gaps in the stories of Auckland. The inviting format and careful, uncluttered design will appeal to a wide audience.

An impressive first book.

NUKU: Stories of 100 Indigenous Women Qiane Matata-Sipu Published by QIANE+co

The strikingly successful outcome of an ambitious project to showcase indigenous women going about their daily lives, doing both ordinary and extraordinary things. The 100 varied examples of talent and triumph are presented in a simple magazine-style format that is as accessible as it is effective. The author gracefully presents her subjects in their own words, stepping aside in the text but being wonderfully present through her tremendous portrait photography, which works seamlessly with the elegant, unpretentious typography in a beautifully cohesive package.

The Architect and the Artists: Hackshaw, McCahon, Dibble Bridget Hackshaw Published by Massey University Press A thorough and beautifully produced triangulation of creative practice that shows the value of collaboration in the arts, as evidenced in the collective projects of James Hackshaw, Colin McCahon and Paul Dibble. Archival material (including personal correspondence and sketches), informative and reflective text, and powerfully evocative photography are delivered cohesively through clean and lively design and typography.

The author’s clear labour of love is reinforced by excellent external contributions, making for an enlightening and brilliant whole. Another impressive and assured first book.

Judges: Chanel Clarke (convenor), Jane Connor, Patrick Reynolds

Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry

Rangikura

Sleeping with Stones

Tayi Tibble Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Serie Barford Published by Anahera Press

In Rangikura, Tayi Tibble further enhances her deserved reputation as a poet who writes with vibrant energy and talent. She has vision, and here sets out to combine vernacular with refined poetics, giving a voice to urban Māori. The result is dense and rich with life and language.

These poems pay tribute to Millennial culture and use the power of humour, sexuality and friendship to create a collection that encapsulates this generation of Aotearoa.

Through a kind of verse novel, Serie Barford builds the story of a person, a loss and a life that continues on despite it all. Sleeping with Stones is a skillfully structured collection in which each poem accumulates and moves through time.

Barford’s gift is her ability to use simple eloquence to write about complex matters. This collection does what poetry should do: give words to the things for which there are no words.

The Sea Walks into a Wall

Tumble

Anne Kennedy Published by Auckland University Press

Joanna Preston Published by Otago University Press

An up-to-the-minute contemporary collection that tests the very limits of what poetry can do. With her playful intellect and supreme confidence, Anne Kennedy creates poems that are consistently engaged with issues of the anthropocene, beneath which a constant, powerful tide flows and pulls.

Worldly, and deeply in the world, The Sea Walks into a Wall bears witness to the grit and gravity of contemporary life.

Each poem in Tumble is a glimpse into a different world, and no two poems inhabit the same reality. Drawing from lines of art, history, contemporary journalism and fellow poets, the collection confidently shifts perspectives and registers, points of view and tone, while being held together by Joanna Preston’s light touch.

Her pristine imagery and fine ear for rhythm and beat means every poem — and the book itself — is a celebration of poetry.

Judges: Saradha Koirala (convenor), Jane Arthur, Apirana Taylor

Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

A Good Winter

Entanglement

Gigi Fenster Published by Text Publishing

Bryan Walpert Published by Mākaro Press

Word by word, inch by inch, Gigi Fenster immerses us in the increasingly unsettling psyche of her narrator. Olga lends a hand with her friend’s daughter, who has recently given birth, but the helpful old woman gradually takes on a more sinister role.

It is an unnerving and absorbing reading experience as the darkness gradually closes in. Fenster creates an unforgettable voice, which at first seems so light and benign as — impeccably paced — the psychological tumult builds to a truly mesmerising crescendo.

Dazzlingly intelligent and ambitious in scope, Entanglement spans decades and continents, explores the essence of time and delves into topics as complex as quantum physics.

But at the heart of Bryan Walpert’s novel is the human psyche and all its intricacies.

A writer plagued by two tragedies in his past reflects on where it all went wrong, and his desperation leads him back to Baltimore in 1977. A novel unafraid to ask difficult questions, and a novelist unwilling to patronise his readers.

Greta & Valdin

Kurangaituku

Rebecca K Reilly Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Whiti Hereaka Published by Huia Publishers

From the very first page, this novel has readers laughing out loud at the daily trials of these two Māori-Russian-Catalonian siblings. The titular characters navigate Auckland while dealing with heartbreak, OCD, family secrets, the costs of living, Tinder, public transport and more, and they do it all with massive amounts of heart. Greta & Valdin is gloriously queer, hilarious and relatable.

With her debut novel, Rebecca K Reilly has written a modern classic.

Ten years ago, Whiti Hereaka decided to begin the task of rescuing Kurangaituku, the birdwoman ogress from the Māori myth, Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman.

In this extraordinary and richly imagined novel, Hereaka gives voice and form to Kurangaituku, allowing her to tell us not only her side of the story but also everything she knows about the newly made Māori world and after-life. Told in a way that embraces Māori oral traditions, Kurangaituku is poetic, intense, clever, and sexy as hell.

Judges: Rob Kidd (convenor), Gemma Browne, Kelly Ana Morey

General Non-Fiction Award

From the Centre: A Writer’s Life

The Alarmist: Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change

On one level this is a personal memoir of love and of family — Patricia Grace writes of her husband, her children and her extended family, of being schooled and of teaching — but her life is also played out in the context of social history, the time when many Māori began to move from rural to urban environments; Grace is always aware that she lives within a much larger community. Hers is a rare literary memoir, free of egotism.

In this wide-ranging autobiography, Dave Lowe follows New Zealand’s critical role in charting carbon emissions from the 1970s onwards.

Writing of the methodical collection of critical data allows Lowe to convey major scientific concepts to the general reader in a very accessible way.

The Alarmist has a rich texture of family and a clear awareness that members of the scientific community are not always in harmony.

It is enlightening as well as very readable.

The Mirror Book

Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa

Patricia Grace Published by Penguin, Penguin Random House

Charlotte Grimshaw Published by Vintage, Penguin Random House A writer of novels and short fiction turns to non-fiction with a memoir par excellence.

In this book of trauma, recovery and selfdiscovery, the prose is exquisitely precise in its navigation of the complexity of the author’s family dynamics and its interrogation of how it has shaped the construction of her identity and influenced her writing. The Mirror Book combines the personal and the literary with the sociological. It has been — and deserves to be — widely read.

Dave Lowe Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Vincent O’Malley Published by Bridget Williams Books An admirable work of historical scholarship drawing on many sources, Māori and Pākehā.

Vincent O'Malley's craft lies in unpacking those sources in an eloquent and incisive way, and he helps readers to think critically as he presents balanced arguments about contested battles and other conflicts.

In the process, he weaves a coherent history of the New Zealand Wars.

Essential reading for New Zealanders, with the bonus of excellent book production by the publishers.

Judges: Nicholas Reid (convenor), Aaron Smale, Leilani Tamu

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MAKING HOMES, BUILDING IMAGINATION

Victoria Martinez picked Aotearoa as her new home for three reasons — some of her best friends had headed to our shores, she wanted to improve her English and she’d heard this was a beautiful country. “I wasn’t disappointed,” the sometime Brazilian says with a smile. “I love it here. I love the beaches, I’ve made new friends from my soccer team — and I’ve learnt how to drive a crane!”

It was while she was working at Manaaki, Ockham’s first development in Onehunga, that Victoria started reading her first New Zealand book — Lonely Planet New Zealand/Aotearoa (by a gifted writing ensemble that included Ockham Collective’s very own Peter Dragicevich). “I like reading about new places to explore here,” Victoria says. “Reading about travel feels magical at the moment, you know?” Certainly we do! Books are portable magic, especially during a pandemic. Thanks to our writers for making us think, dream and wonder.