Wellington writer Ingrid Horrocks has won New Zealand’s richest literary prize with a debut short story collection, taking home the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in Auckland on Wednesday night.
Horrocks claimed the top award for All Her Lives, a collection that traces nine women through different stages of life. The book sees off competition from a strong field that included The Book of Guilt by two-time fiction winner Catherine Chidgey, Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent and How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon. Judge Craig Cliff described All Her Lives as emotionally intelligent and historically alert, a description Horrocks said captured the quiet ambitions of a book she had been writing for the better part of a decade.
The ceremony at the Auckland Writers Festival turned into a celebration of new voices, with debut works winning three of the four major categories. That is an unusually strong showing for first-time entrants in a competition long dominated by established names, and judges said it pointed to a deep bench of New Zealand writing talent working below the surface of the better-known publishing world.
In the poetry category Nafanua Purcell Kersel won the $12,000 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Black Sugarcane, a collection that draws on Samoan family history, sugar plantation labour and the long arc of Pacific migration. Judge Daren Kamali said each poem pulses with clarity, restraint and quiet power, and that Purcell Kersel had brought something to New Zealand poetry that had not been heard in quite the same register before. Black Sugarcane beat work by Sophie van Waardenberg, Erik Kennedy and Anna Jackson.
The General Non-Fiction Award went to Tina Makereti for This Compulsion in Us, a memoir that works its way through whakapapa, identity, family secrets and the writing life. Makereti, of Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore and Pākehā descent, has built a quietly powerful body of work as a novelist and essayist over the past fifteen years, and judges said the memoir confirmed her as one of the most distinctive nonfiction voices in the country. The category also featured former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose political memoir A Different Kind of Power had been a strong contender on the shortlist.
Wellington historian Elizabeth Cox won the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction with Mr Ward’s Map, an extraordinary street by street portrait of Victorian Wellington built around a single surviving cadastral map. Cox uses the map as a window into the small worlds of grocers, undertakers, brickmakers and boarding house keepers in the colonial capital. Judges said the book turned what could have been a dry archival exercise into a richly social history of the city.
The Te Mūrau o te Tuhi Māori Language Award went to Tā Pou Temara for Te Āhua o Ngā Kupu Whakaari a Te Kooti, a work that explores the language and prophecies of Te Kooti Arikirangi. The award recognises the very best writing in te reo Māori and carries particular weight given the small number of works published each year in the language.
Three of the four Best First Book Awards, worth $3,000 each, also went to writers who later won or were finalists in the main categories. John Prins took the fiction prize for Pastoral Care, Sophie van Waardenberg won poetry for No Good and Philip Garnock-Jones took illustrated non-fiction with He Puāwai, a natural history of New Zealand’s native flowers. The fourth Best First Book Award, in general non-fiction, went to Dame Jacinda Ardern for A Different Kind of Power. Ardern donated her prize money, according to a report by the New Zealand Herald.
For Horrocks, the win caps a long road into fiction. She is better known as a poet, essayist and travel writer, with two poetry collections and the memoir Where We Swim already behind her. She teaches creative writing at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, and All Her Lives began as a series of standalone pieces written between teaching, parenting and her other public work. She told reporters after the ceremony that she had not expected the book to find such a wide readership, and that the recognition felt like a vote of confidence for the quieter end of the short story form.
The Acorn Foundation has now funded the country’s top fiction prize for more than a decade, and the $65,000 purse remains by some distance the largest single award in New Zealand letters. Booksellers New Zealand chief executive Renee Rowland said the strong showing for debut writers and small presses at this year’s ceremony was a sign that the local book trade, despite well documented pressures, was still finding and backing new talent.
The full list of winners and finalists is on the New Zealand Book Awards Trust website, and RNZ’s coverage includes interviews with several of the winners. The judges’ citations and shortlist details are also available on the New Zealand Society of Authors site for readers who want to dig further into this year’s field.
For book buyers, the practical effect of the awards is usually a spike in sales over the following weeks. Independent booksellers around the country, including Unity Books, Time Out, Volume in Nelson and Scorpio in Christchurch, were already promoting the winning titles on their front tables on Thursday morning.
Which of this year’s winners are you planning to pick up first, and is there a book on the shortlist you think should have taken the top prize? Drop a comment below and let us know what you have been reading.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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