Every single book shortlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand national book awards – that’s 16 titles, the best of the best – is up for grabs in the greatest book giveaway of all times since last year and the year before that. One reader will win the lot. The offer is exclusive to ReadingRoom in our third annual contest in association with the national book awards.
The shortlist was announced yesterday. We’re talking novels by Eleanor Catton and Emily Perkins, four collections of poetry, a really beautiful book of paintings by Don Binney, Emma Espiner’s memoir which I am betting will win the nonfiction prize – the whole lot, and more, is available. Retail value, close to $1000. Entries open now, today, this minute. Details towards the end of the story.
First, some shortlist commentary and that. The glamour category is fiction, with the book everyone thinks will win (Eleanor Catton’s exciting but fairly ridiculous Birnam Wood) up against the book I hope will win (Lioness, a LOL satire of the rich by Emily Perkins). Judges may have other ideas. They have already shocked with the exclusion of Pet by Catherine Chidgey, and instead shortlisted Pip Adam’s daring sci-fi romp Audition, and a historical novel by….Stephen Daisley, the great who-the-hell-is-he? novelist in New Zealand literature, a complete nobody until he won the fiction prize in 2016 for Coming Rain. He promptly returned to obscurity – he lives in Australia – but has resurfaced with war novel A Better Place. Publisher’s blurbology: “Twin brothers Roy and Tony Mitchell fought in World War II. Only Roy returned. Tony was killed in action on Crete, his death recounted in visceral detail, and Roy came back to New Zealand forever changed. He built a lone hut near a creek”, etc.
JANN MEDLIOCOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
A Better Place by Stephen Daisley (Text Publishing)
Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury)
To nonfiction. There’s a Cure for This by Emma Espiner is thin, maybe only 50,000 words or thereabouts, but her essays which masquerade as a memoir are always thoughtful, centred on wider issues of health and race, and beautifully written – I awarded her the Best Writer in New Zealand Journalism prize in 2019, live at the dear old Hamilton Press Club, and I think she’ll pick up the Ockham prize in May as well. Her competition is another memoir by Dunedin writer Barbara Else, essays by scholar Damon Salesa, and a book about the ceremonial waka taua Ngātokimatawhaorua that rests on the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi, by Jeff Evans, who wrote it during his Masters of Creative Writing year at the University of Auckland.
GENERAL NON-FICTION AWARD
An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books)
Laughing at the Dark: A Memoir by Barbara Else (Penguin Random House)
Ngātokimatawhaorua: The Biography of a Waka by Jeff Evans (Massey University Press)
There’s a Cure for This by Emma Espiner (Penguin Random House)
Poetry isn’t what it used to be. This year’s shortlisted titles include a novel written in verse by Bill Nelson: “A woman lies helpless after a stroke, her family gathered. Her grandson, healing slowly from a head injury after coming off his bike, takes leave from his job and family to prepare her rundown house and farm for sale.” Similarly cheerless is a family memoir written in verse by Grace Yee: “Ping leaves Hong Kong to live in the South Island to work in a rat-infested shop frying fish, and every evening she waits for her wayward husband, armed with a vacuum cleaner to ‘suck all the bad thing out’. Eldest daughter Cherry struggles with her mother’s unhappiness and the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings, especially the rage-prone, meat-cleaver-wielding Baby Joseph.”
I am backing Talia by Isla Huia to win. This is good:
in this city, it costs more to live/ by the airport than by the sea/ so we get stoned in the car at the/ end of the runway,/ waiting for the/ emirates A380, laughing as the richest/ boys in town chant/ my dad is your dad’s boss/ when they score a try.
MARY AND PETER BIGGSY PRIZE FOR POETRY
At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press)
Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing)
Root Leaf Flower Fruit by Bill Nelson (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) (Dead Bird Books)
Finally, the picture book category. I named Greg O’Brien’s book on Don Binney the best designed book of illustrated nonfiction of 2023 at the annual ReadingRoom best-ofs in December, and I hope it picks up the Ockham. Hats off, though, to Liv Sisson, for the year’s biggest-selling picture book, her foraging masterpiece Fungi of Aotearoa. The other two titles are a bit ZZZ.
BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NZ AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION
Don Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press)
Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide by Liv Sisson (Penguin Random House)
Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds, Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)
Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History by Ryan Bodman (Bridget Williams Books)
So! To the greatest book giveaway of all times since last year and the year before that. To enter the 2024 ReadingRoom Greatest Book Prize of All Times, name the one book you regard as the very best book published in New Zealand last year, and say why it is that you esteem it so highly. It might be something on the shortlist. It might be something that only made it as far as the longlist, like Catherine Chidgey’s tremendously involving schoolgirl thriller Pet, or the outstanding photo book Our Land in Colour: A History of Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960 by Brendan Graham with Jock Phillips, or End Times by Rebecca Priestley, reviewed at length and with considerable searching intelligence by Anna Rankin at ReadingRoom this week. You may wish to nominate another book entirely, nowhere near the Ockham elite, so like maybe a kids book or a comic or a manual on how to make a bear trap or the year’s most talked-about novel, The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa.
But anyway the point is to choose whichever book was your favourite of all books published in New Zealand in 2023, and write a few lines, or a great many lines, up to you, saying what you like about it. The book that gets the most nominations, by the way, can be informally regarded as winner of a People’s Choice Award.
Email your entry – don’t forget, for God’s sake, to actually write something about your favourite NZ book of 2023 – to stephen11@xtra.co.nz with the subject line in screaming caps I REALLY WANT TO WIN THE 2024 READINGROOM GREATEST BOOK PRIZE OF ALL TIMES SINCE LAST YEAR AND THE YEAR BEFORE THAT. Entries close at midnight on Sunday, April 28. The winner will be announced in ReadingRoom on Wednesday, May 15; the Ockhams will be announced that evening.
