Our Finest
The New Zealand Book Awards Trust Te Ohu Tiaki i Te Rau Hiringa is delighted to present the 16 finalists in the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, the premier literary honours of Aotearoa.
We have considerable admiration for the 12 judges (named on each category page that follows) who took on the task of narrowing a highly competitive field of 175 entries to a longlist of 43, and then to the deserving shortlisted titles they describe in this booklet. The fiction panel is joined at this stage by a specially appointed international judge, esteemed literary festival chair, books editor, broadcaster, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Georgina Godwin.
The Trust remains tremendously grateful to the partners who share our belief in the transformative influence that our writers and their books have on the cultural landscape of Aotearoa: First, magnificent naming sponsor Ockham Residential, which celebrates 10 years of its association with the Ockhams in 2025, and decades-long supporter Creative New Zealand. We also treasure the loyalty of Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand – presenters of BookHub; Mary and Peter Biggs; the Mātātuhi Foundation; the Auckland Writers Festival; and the Acorn Foundation, which represents the interests of the late Jann Medlicott MNZM, whose generosity has secured the fiction prize money in perpetuity. Ngā mihi nunui ki a koutou.
Most importantly, he kupu whakamihi to all the authors and their publishers whose inspired work has been recognised and honoured in the 2025 shortlist. We urge readers to seek out their titles in bookstores and libraries. You can join us to hear the finalists reading from their books, and to celebrate the ultimate winners, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre at Auckland’s Aotea Centre on Wednesday 14 May.
For more details and tickets visit www.writersfestival.co.nz.
#theockhams www.nzbookawards.nz
Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist
Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson
Massey University Press
A celebration of the Whanganui-born artist Edith Collier (1885–1964), this attractive publication coincided with the reopening of the Sarjeant Gallery and an exhibition of over 150 of Collier’s works. Jill Trevelyan’s substantial introductory essay and further essays by other writers and artists offer fresh insights into Collier’s life and the continuing impact of her work, illustrated with historical photographs and a generous selection of highquality reproductions of her art.
Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa
Matiu Baker (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Whakaue), Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice
Te Papa Press
How do you tell stories from a bleak chapter in New Zealand’s history when your own institutional forebears had a less-than honourable role in the narrative? A curatorial team from Te Papa attempts exactly that through 500 collection objects. Complemented by longer-form essays from guest writers, this richly illustrated book is accessible to a general audience, and relevant to the Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum. It is also very topical with the current public discourse on Te Tiriti.
Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer
Athol McCredie Te Papa Press
Meet Leslie Adkin (1888-1964), a hard-working farmer and amateur photographer whose intellectual curiosity often challenged the established wisdom of New Zealand’s highereducated, scientific elite. Athol McCredie’s longstanding dedication to bringing Adkin’s story and photographs to wider public attention is clearly evident. The result is a surprisingly intimate portrait that rewards the reader with carefully curated, stunning imagery, complemented with a well-researched, accessibly-written text. Elegantly designed, the book is a pleasure to handle, browse and read.
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art
Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) and Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī)
Auckland University Press
A magnum opus with an ambitious kaupapa: to establish a Maori framework for indigenous art history. The result of 12 years of research, this book is destined to become a standard New Zealand art history text that will feature on tertiary reading lists and library shelves, both in New Zealand and overseas, for years to come. Flawlessly designed and extensively illustrated, it makes excellent use of archival institutional sources.
Judges: Chris Szekely (convenor), Jessica Palalagi, Kirstie Ross
Hopurangi - Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka
Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) Auckland University Press
Robert Sullivan’s collection presents a distinctive and musical poetic voice, inflected with te reo Māori. The poet is almost a tribal shaman, making observations that invoke planetary energies. In this way he offers a visionary way of seeing that connects to the natural world. In search of selftransformation he invokes metamorphosis and the Māori spirit world. Māori creation myths, Treaty claims, Ovid, Dante, recent iwi histories and cradle Catholicism are all part of the rich mix.
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit
Emma Neale
Otago University Press
This is a collection concerned with fibs and fables, and telling true stories perceived by others as tall stories. Emma Neale’s wordalchemy takes everyday fustian and transforms it into something fine and precious and enduring as she strives for epiphanies, for transcendence, for truth-telling — for telling moments sifted from the quotidian flux. Fastidious attention to precise luminous detail, a vigilant ear for sound patterns, and an ironically self-aware literary consciousness are in play.
In the Half Light of a Dying Day
C.K. Stead
Auckland University Press
Love and grief and a breakthrough from Catullus’ familiar stance to raw emotion mark C.K. Stead’s meditation on the death of his beloved, Kezia (wife, Kay). The poems are the more moving because the Stead virtues still play their part in the telling selection of details (what to wear in a casket; the company of a cat). In this exploration of time and loss, sentimentality is banished. Everything has been changed, utterly and profoundly.
Slender Volumes
Richard von Sturmer Spoor Books
This substantial publication with its witty and paradoxical title is a meditative poetry journal, artfully constructed to present what amounts to a series of mirabilia: anecdotes that might arouse astonishment or wonder in a spiritual sense. Richard von Sturmer’s poems seek illumination from the ordinary everyday world. Drawing partly on Buddhist teachings, life itself is here seen as miraculous. There's a dancing intelligence at work, highly alert, selfaware, and fearless.
Judges: David Eggleton (convenor), Elizabeth Smither MNZM, Jordan Tricklebank (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Mahuta)
At the Grand Glacier Hotel
Laurence Fearnley
Penguin, Penguin Random House
While recovering from a leg sarcoma, Libby is temporarily stranded in the Grand Glacier Hotel. At the base of the swiftly retreating Fox Glacier, she gradually rediscovers her self-confidence and mobility. This novel introduces an ordinary but spectacular world in which it’s possible to imagine that the extinct South Island kōkako yet lives. The sense of place, the fascinating cast of characters, and the investigation of human relationships linger long after the book is closed.
Pretty Ugly
Kirsty Gunn
Otago University Press
What is ugly in this collection are the conflicts and secrets that drive each plot: burning wind turbines, mutated salmon and mortal hatred. In stories set in the UK and New Zealand, Kirsty Gunn’s characters confront forces that challenge their capacity to endure. Images of triumph are brought into sharp focus by a masterful wordsmith: memories of a pristine river, a herd of running deer and the shot not fired.
Delirious
Damien Wilkins
Te Herenga Waka University Press
A novel of humanity, humour and understated prose, Delirious is a luminously written and poignant exploration of aging, memory and the fraught ties of family. Retired policewoman Mary and recently retired librarian Pete decide to shift into a retirement home, but an unexpected development in the 40-year-old case of their son’s death immerses them in a journey that recasts what might have been the end as an uplifting new beginning.
The Mires
Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti RangatahiMatakore, Pākehā)
Ultimo Press
Keri and her daughter Wairere, whose psychic sensitivity allows her insight into the minds of the living and the dead, share a row of flats with a family of climate refugees and a Pākehā woman whose radicalised son returns home. Audaciously located at the leaky intersection of race, class and climate justice, The Mires navigates themes of racism and disinformation in ways that are manaenhancing and yet surprising.
Judges: Thom Conroy (convenor), Carole Beu, Tania Roxborogh (Ngāti Porou)
General Non-Fiction Award
Bad Archive
Flora Feltham
Te Herenga Waka University Press
These beautifully crafted and meditative essays are by turns moving, delightful and challenging. Building on each other in unexpected but always illuminating ways, taken together they present an intimate portrait of the author Flora Feltham’s life and relationships, and invite the reader to reflect on the duality of love and grief, the meaning of family and the importance of craft – with both words and textiles – in the making of meaning.
The Chthonic Cycle
Una Cruickshank
Te Herenga Waka University Press
How would we know if we are living through a mass extinction? Are there signs in the physical archive – the fossils, stories, jewellery and perfumes humans have carried into the 21st century but perhaps failed to interpret? In this singular essay collection, Una Cruickshank unpacks the science and history of pearls, jet, amber, coral and other talismans from the biosphere to open new perspectives on climate change, humanity, and maybe hope.
Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery
Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) HarperCollins Publishers Aotearoa
New Zealand
Hine Toa defies easy categorisation. It is a rich, personal, stunningly evocative and creative memoir of Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku’s life, from early childhood on ‘the pā’ at Ōhinemutu to academic achievements such as being the first wahine Māori to be awarded a PhD in New Zealand. But it is also a fiery social and political history of this country through the midlate 20th century from a vital, queer, Māori, feminist perspective that deserves – and here claims – centre stage.
The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation
Richard Shaw Massey University Press
Building on his earlier memoir The Forgotten Coast, Richard Shaw commits to the confronting but critical work of decolonisation, weaving his own stories and family histories with those of other Pākehā ‘settler’ descendants willing to look the trauma and intergenerational implications of colonisation in the eye. What if the benign family stories you grew up with masked something very different? An important and timely read for tangata Tiriti.
Judges: Holly Walker (convenor), Ross Calman (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāi Tahu), Gilbert Wong
Proud supporters of the New Zealand literary community since 2018
The Mātātuhi Foundation has invested over $400,000 into Aotearoa’s literary sector.
2025 funding applications are now open. Apply online matatuhifoundation.co.nz
A lot has happened over the last 10 years. Looking back on a tumultuous decade, there are two things we’re particularly proud of: delivering over a thousand new homes for the people of Tāmaki Makaurau and our continuing role as principal sponsor of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 2025 marks the tenth year of our relationship with the awards and we couldn’t be more excited to celebrate this milestone. Here’s to the next chapter!