Book in running for award recognition

Shirley Corlett's already- acclaimed children's fiction book, You've got guts, Kenny Melrose, continues to be acknowledged in literary circles.
This time she has been named a finalist in the junior fiction category of the 2005 New Zealand Post Book Awards for children and young adults.
The New Zealand Post Book Awards are judged in four categories, picture book, non-fiction, junior fiction and young adult fiction.
There are five finalists in each category and this year the awards attracted 123 entries.
Up against other esteemed writers such as Jack Lasenby and Fleur Beale, Shirley was thrilled to learn yesterday of her selection.
She is the chance to win $5000 as a category winner, and the opportunity to win the supreme award, worth an extra $5000.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony at Parliament on Thursday May 19.
Set in 1920s New Zealand, the book is a grim tale of orphanage living and a young man trying to pave out a life. Many issues of the time are included, such as conscientious objection, shell shock, the looming spectre of unemployment for working class families, dealing with the death of family members and corporal punishment.
Times-Age book reviewer Margaret Christensen raved about the work saying it was handled with great sensitivity and attention to detail.
She said daily life such as washing clothes in the copper, making shoes from sugar bags, the night cart, kerosene lamps and the arrival of electricity makes this children's epic an unstoppable and deeply affecting reading.
Shirley Corlett admits to an increasing passion for New Zealand history and has noted a gap in the market for children's books along this theme.
Kenny Melrose had already been acknowledged by publishers, Scholastic New Zealand as its book of the month.
Also for Scholastic, Shirley has written an account of the 1968 Wahine Disaster called Abandon Ship and another, Fire in the Sky, on the 1886 Mt Tarawera eruption. Both are written in diary form from a child's perspective.
Since her first published adult fiction in 1999, The Hanging Sky, which she laughingly described as "faction", a combination of historical fact and fictitious characters, Shirley has written two other books for young people, The Stolen and The Weather Makers, and is currently working on another, called Through Thick and Thin.
A former bank officer, Shirley began writing fulltime 15 years ago.
She works to a strict regime closing herself off in her office behind the garage at the rear of her garden in Kuripuni, Masterton.