Wellington-based author Emily Perkins kept her cool, but declared she was “completely shocked” at winning New Zealand’s richest writing prize.
Perkins was named as the winner of the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for Lioness, the biggest prize in the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
“I still can’t believe this is happening,” said Perkins.
She took out the award ahead of formidable opposition: Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, Pip Adam’s Audition and Stephen Daisley’s A Better Place. All four authors have previously won the nation’s top fiction prize. Said the judges of Lioness: “It is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage and the search for authenticity.”
The annual book awards’ ceremony was held in Auckland and attended by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who delivered a brief speech in which he said he recognised the importance of reading and NZ’s book publishing sector. He then went onto say this is why his government has prioritised the introduction of “structured literacy” in NZ schools.
Luxon’s speech met with a tepid reaction from the crowd who included some of NZ’s most acclaimed authors, publishers, and booklovers. Winning writers, often in fluent te reo Māori, used the occasion to remind Luxon of the economic importance of NZ’s book publishing sector, which contributes about $290 million to GDP, but also its necessity for cultural life.
“The stories we tell reflect our national identity,” said Nicola Legat, chair of the NZ Book Awards Trust.
Luxon was accompanied by Paul Goldsmith, whose portfolios include Arts, Culture and Heritage and, more recently, Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media. Goldsmith was a published author before entering Parliament.
Accepting the EH McCormick Prize for General Non-Fiction best first book, writer/doctor Emma Wehipeihana talked of how she had worked 18 back-to-back days at Middlemore Hospital, in South Auckland, and was preparing to work 48-hours as part of a skeleton staff to cover for striking junior doctors.
Wehipeihana said caring for the sick and the dying had shown her that “arts and stories elevate us from being sacks of meat orbiting a dying star”.
“The beautiful thing about having two careers is that sometimes the frontline can talk back,” she declared to hearty applause.
Perkins, too, urged politicians to read, saying stories remind us of how “vulnerable, layered, loving, and connected we all are”.
Christchurch-raised Grace Yee won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry for Chinese Fish. Yee’s debut collection, which narrates a Hong Kong family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s, “blurs genres, dances around the page and crosses languages by fusing Cantonese-Taishanese and English”, the judges said. Yee, who lives in Melbourne, recently took home the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for Chinese Fish.
Gregory O’Brien won the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction for Don Binney: Flight Path, encapsulating “the artist’s full life, honestly portraying his often contrary personality, and carefully interrogating a formidably large body of work and its place in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history”.
Damon Salesa won the General Non-Fiction Award for An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays. The judges said it “weaves together academic rigour, captivating stories and engaging prose to reframe our understanding of New Zealand’s colonial history in the South Pacific”.
Tā Pou Temara receives the 2024 Te Mūrau o te Tuhi Māori Language Award for Te Rautakitahi O Tūhoe ki Ōrākau, which explores the Tūhoe men and women who went to fight with Ngāti Maniapoto in the battle of Ōrākau during the NZ Wars.
Each category winner takes home $12,000 in prize money.
The winners of the first book awards, who pocket $3000, are: Emma Hislop, who receives the Hubert Church Prize for Fiction for Ruin and Other Stories; Megan Kitching, the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry for At the Point of Seeing; Ryan Bodman, the Judith Binney Prize for Illustrated Non-Fiction for Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History; and Emma Wehipeihana (Espiner), the EH McCormick Prize for General Non-Fiction for her memoir There’s a Cure For This.
2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards - full results
Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction
Winner: Emily Perkins, Lioness, (Bloomsbury).
Finalists: Stephen Daisley, A Better Place, (Text Publishing); Pip Adam, Audition (Te Herenga Waka University Press); Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (Te Herenga Waka University Press).
Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Winner: Grace Yee, Chinese Fish (Giramondo Publishing).
Finalists: Megan Kitching, At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press); Bill Nelson, Root Leaf Flower Fruit (Te Herenga Waka University Press); Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) Talia (Dead Bird Books).
Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction
Winner: Gregory O’Brien, Don Binney: Flight Path (Auckland University Press).
Finalists: Liv Sisson, Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide (Penguin, Penguin Random House); Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi), Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills (Dunedin Public Art Gallery); Ryan Bodman, Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History (Bridget Williams Books).
General Non-Fiction Award
Winner: Damon Salesa, An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays (Bridget Williams Books).
Finalists: Barbara Else, Laughing at the Dark: A Memoir (Penguin, Penguin Random House); Jeff Evans, Ngātokimatawhaorua: The Biography of a Waka (Massey University Press); Emma Wehipeihana (published as Emma Espiner) (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou), There’s a Cure for This (Penguin, Penguin Random House).
To find out more about the winners’ titles go to https://www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealand-book-awards/2024-awards/winners/
