Ockham New Zealand Book Awards: Damien Wilkins’ Delirious wins fiction prize

All the winners from the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

• Damien Wilkins has won the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction with his novel Delirious.
• The non-fiction prizes went to Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki.
• Emma Neale won the poetry award in a shortlist that included C. K. Stead.

A 600-page book about Māori art that took 12 years to complete and a repeat winner in the big fiction prize category were among the highlights at tonight’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Wellington author Damien Wilkins received the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction with Delirious, a novel about families and ageing described by judges as a “damn fine read”.

Wilkins’ flight to Auckland was delayed and his publisher, Fergus Barrowman at Te Herenga Waka University Press, had just accepted the award on his behalf when Wilkins bounded onto the stage minutes before the ceremony at the Aotea Centre came to a close.

Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) and Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī) won the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction. The landmark tome, weighing in at a reported 4kg, contains more than 500 images and took more than a decade to complete.

In an emotional acceptance speech, Ellis paid tribute to Mane-Wheoki, who died in 2014, and acknowledged the recent passing of artists Robyn Kahukiwa (Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Konohi, Te Whānau-a-Ruataupare) and Fred Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), who are both featured in the book.

Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) – curator, critic, activist and the first Māori woman to gain a PhD – won the General Non-Fiction Award for her memoir Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery.

Te Awekōtuku’s partner performed a haka from the stalls after the win was announced, and MC Miriama Kamo also paid tribute to her: “Whaea, you have blazed a path for all women but also for all Māori.”

The Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry went to novelist and poet Emma Neale for her seventh collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit.

Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku - activist, curator, critic, academic and 2025 Ockham Book Awards winner. Photo/Andrew Warner

Alongside the four major category winners, four best first books (sponsored by the Mātātuhi Foundation) were recognised.

Michelle Rahurahu (Ngāti Rahurahu, Ngāti Tahu–Ngāti Whaoa) took the Hubert Church Prize for Fiction with her novel Poorhara, while the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry went to Manuali’I by Rex Letoa Paget (Samoan/Danish). Kirsty Baker’s Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa won the Judith Binney Prize for Illustrated Non-Fiction, and Una Cruickshank’s The Chthonic Cycle was awarded the E.H. McCormick Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Across the eight winning books celebrated at a ceremony held on Wednesday night at Auckland’s Aotea Centre, three were published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, two by Auckland University Press and one each by Otago University Press, Saufo’i Press and HarperCollins Aotearoa New Zealand.

For Damien Wilkins, selected from a fiction prize shortlist that included Laurence Fearnley, Kirsty Gunn and Tina Makeriti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā), it was his second win.

The now director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University first took the fiction award in 1994 with The Miserables. He was a runner-up in 2001 for Nineteen Windows Under Ash and again in 2007 for The Fainter.

Delirious, his 14th published book, was described as intimate, funny and honest by Thom Conroy, fiction category judges convenor.

“An absorbing, inspiring novel and a damn fine read,” said Conroy. “What stood out ... was the assured but understated touch of prose as it flows elegantly across the decades, threads the intricacies of relationship, and fathoms the ongoing evolution of a couple’s grief.”

Still breathless from his last-minute race to the ceremony, Wilkins recalled being presented with his first fiction award 30 years ago by Joan Bolger, wife of New Zealand’s then-Prime Minister Jim Bolger, at Premier House in Wellington, “where you could fit all of New Zealand literature on six sofas and four armchairs”.

Noting that for a 10-year period, he earned no money at all from book sales, Wilkins thanked “everyone who refrained from telling me to do something else”.

Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art – a landmark title 12 years in the making and a 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards winner.

Toi te Mana by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, was dedicated to the latter, who died after work on the book began.

The comprehensive survey of Māori art – from voyaging waka to the contemporary – was “extensively researched and thoughtfully written, casting a wide inclusive net”, said Chris Szekely, illustrated non-fiction judges convenor.

Szekely congratulated art historians Brown and Ellis “for carrying the baton to completion, a Herculean task akin to the mahi of Maui himself”.

Holly Walker, judges convenor for the general non-fiction award said Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku’s Hine Toa was both a personal testimony and taonga – a book that defied easy categorisation, moving from memoir to “a fiery social and political history . . . from a vital queer, Māori, feminist perspective”.

In the poetry category, judges convenor David Eggleton lauded Emma Neale’s ability to “turn confessional anecdotes into quicksilvery flashes of insight”. Her winning collection (from a shortlist that included one of the country’s most well-known writers and former poet laureate C. K. Stead) was described as a book about fibs and fables “and the knock-on or flow-on effects of distrust, the scales dropping from one’s eyes”.

The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards were established in 1968 (as the Wattie Book Awards).

Last year’s fiction prize also went to a repeat winner - Emily Perkins won in 2024 for Lioness and in 2009 for Novel About My Wife.

Full list of Ockham winners and finalists:

Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction won by Delirious, Damien Wilkins, Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Shortlisted: At the Grand Glacier Hotel, Laurence Fearnley, Penguin, Penguin Random House; Pretty Ugly, Kirsty Gunn, Otago University Press; The Mires, Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā), Ultimo Press.

Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry won by Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Emma Neale, Otago University Press.

Shortlisted: Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka, Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu), Auckland University Press; In the Half Light of a Dying Day, C.K. Stead, Auckland University Press; Slender Volumes, Richard von Sturmer, Spoor Books.

BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction won by 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.

Shortlisted: Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist, Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson, Massey University Press; Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer, Athol McCredie, Te Papa Press; 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.

General Non-Fiction Award won by Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato), HarperCollins Publishers Aotearoa New Zealand.

Shortlisted: Bad Archive, Flora Feltham, Te Herenga Waka University Press; The Chthonic Cycle, Una Cruickshank, Te Herenga Waka University Press; The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation, Richard Shaw, Massey University Press.

Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on the Lifestyle Desk.