Stunning all-women poetry and fiction shortlists: NZ Post Book Awards

An exciting shortlist for this years Book Awards - scroll down to see it. All women in the fiction and poetry lists, and two short story collections, could the latter be a first? (The former isn't - in 2008 we had an all-woman fiction and poetry shortlist including my novel The Blue.) 

Some of my favourite books of the year are there: Sue Orr's From Under the Overcoat, Fiona Kidman's The Trouble with Fire, Anna Jackson's Thicket, Dinah Hawken's The leaf-ride; and in the non-fiction list:  Fiona Farrell's The Broken Book and Peter Wells' The Hungry Heart. I haven't yet read Rangatira or Shift but have them on my shelves and will do...  

All the non-fiction choices look superb too - I have handled them all at the bookshop where I work on Fridays. They're beautifully produced - real treasures -- especially Peter Wells' book. 

My favourites are there, so I am happy, but already I'm thinking about the books that didn't make the very brief lists of three in the fiction and poetry categories. Wulf by Hamish Clayton which won Best First Book of Fiction this year (announced last week) is one that occurs to me. Given its quality, I wonder if a longer general shortlist might not have seen him included. 


Many readers were gunning for Sarah Quigley's Conductor (not me) and Owen Marshall's The Larnachs (haven't read it.) Then there are those strong collections of poetry by Vincent O'Sullivan, Jenny Bornholdt and Peter Bland ... Certainly the judges this year have said they would have liked to have had a shortlist of five for these categories as we had in the past. 

I also note that the excellent La Rochelle's Road by Tanya Moir hasn't received a mention in the awards, which is a shame.  It's a first novel and the runners-up for Best First Book aren't announced - but I really think they should be. It's such a boost for a first time author to get that sort of acknowledgement. 

Book Awards judge Chris Bourke:  “Having all the categories restored to five finalists would more accurately represent the quality and breadth of New Zealand’s writing. The same diversity is present in the fiction and poetry - and should be reflected in the shortlists.” Yes, good idea. And a shortlist for the First Book Awards, Chris?


I am betting there'll be some discussion on this on Beattie's Bookblog...  And here's an interesting write-up by the Listener's Guy Somerset  including a podcast of Chris Bourke talking us through the shortlists.

Fiction finalists

From Under the Overcoat Sue Orr Vintage, Random House NZ 9781869790578 (Paperback) 9781869795511 (Ebook)
Rangatira Paula Morris Penguin Group (NZ) 9780143565758
The Trouble with Fire Fiona Kidman Vintage, Random House NZ 9781869793593 (Paperback) 9781869793609 (Ebook)

Poetry finalists

The leaf-ride Dinah Hawken Victoria University Press 9780864736505
Shift Rhian Gallagher Auckland University Press 9781869404871
Thicket Anna Jackson Auckland University Press 9781869404826

Illustrated Non-Fiction finalists

A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy Gregory O'Brien Auckland University Press 9781869404703
New Zealand Film - An Illustrated History Diane Pivac, Frank Stark, and Lawrence McDonald Te Papa Press 9781877385667
New Zealand's Native Trees John Dawson and Rob Lucas Craig Potton Publishing 9781877517013
Playing with Fire: Auckland Studio Potters Society Turns 50 Peter Lange and Stuart Newby Auckland Studio Potters Society– in conjunction with the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries Centre for New Zealand Art Research and Discovery (CNZARD) 9780958281713
Whatu Kākahu / Māori Cloaks Awhina Tamarapa Te Papa Press 9781877385568

General Non-Fiction finalists

Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas Anne Salmond Penguin Group (NZ) 9780670075560 (Hardback) 9781869794750 (Ebook)
The Broken Book Fiona Farrell Auckland University Press 9781869405762
The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso Peter Wells Vintage, Random House NZ 9781869794743 (Hardback) 9781869794750 (Ebook)
So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder That Shocked the World Peter Graham Awa Press 9781877551123
Tupaia: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook's Polynesian Navigator Joan Druett Random House NZ 9781869793869 (Hardback) 9781869797133 (Paperback)

People’s Choice Award
Voting opens today for the nation’s favourite book. Nominations can be made from this year’s finalist books on-line at www.nzpostbookawards.co.nz. The 2012 finalist book with the most votes will be honoured with the much-coveted People’s Choice Award.

In addition to individual category winners, and a People’s Choice Award, there will be a Māori Language Award winner and the overall New Zealand Post Book of the Year winner announced at a gala dinner in Auckland on 1 August 2012.

The overall New Zealand Post Book of the Year Award winner will receive $15,000. Winners of the four Category Awards will each receive $10,000. The Māori Language Award winner will receive $10,000 and the People’s Choice Award winner $5,000.

The PM Awards or A Night at the Murder House

The Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement 2008 were announced tonight. The winners were:
Bill Oliver: Non-fiction
Elizabeth Smither: Poetry
Lloyd Jones: Fiction
:
I arrived at the gate of the place once known as the Murder House at the same time as Paula Morris. Premier House it is now, but once upon a time I travelled there by bus to have my teeth seen to by a bunch of savagely clean dental nurses (or savage and clean, however you remember it). Once the trip there and back from Karori West Normal was so long I wet my pants.

Tonight, there were teeth everywhere, but they were exposed through lipstick and over champagne flutes. Everyone was smiling - Paula Morris, the policeman at the gate, the women with the nametags, Midnight Oil's Peter Garrett, and a glittering display of writers and publishers, editors, journalists and politicians. Only the small children didn't smile.

The reception room, I was relieved to note, had been stripped of its squeaky linoleum and deeply carpeted. The heating was turned to tropical. Bunches of red flowers (rata?) lay on a table near the front to be given to the winners who were still - except to themselves and their whanaus (explaining the small and silent children) -a secret. Worth $60,000, the Prime Ministers Awards for Literary Achievement are quite something, and the air at the old house on the hill - once upon a time vinegary with tension - was honeyed with success.

Kate de Goldi was MC, the PM was PM and Fiona Kidman as the winner of the Michael King Writers Fellowship this year was first up. She talked about meeting Helen Clark at a book launch in Thorndon many years ago, and how nervous the young backbencher was to be included in the book Head and Shoulders which was about successful women. Fiona pointed out that she and the PM had moved onwards and upwards, and was thrilled with the MK Award which would allow her to write without worry.

Clark followed that up with a story of her own about how the media the day after Head and Shoulders came out reported that a female backbencher had declared male MPs sexist. 'Who is that brave woman?' she said to herself, before discovering the comment had been made by her in the newly released book. A visit to the then Prime Minister was required to explain herself.

And then for the big announcements.

Bill Oliver gave an eloquent and generous speech from a wheelchair, thanking a raft of other people for his being there tonight. He explained that in his 'very long life' he had usually worked collaboratively as an historian and especially on the Dictionary of NZ Biography.

A delighted Elizabeth Smither (declared an 'all-rounder' by the PM) was quirky and humorous about the win, talking about how NZ writers aren't used to such large sums of money and how they don't always know how to dress. She said Clark's support for the arts in this country had led to something that was no less than a revolution.

The Man in Black, Lloyd Jones, was typically modest. He said Kate de Goldi (MC) had once commented that she wanted him 'to stop winning things', and he was worried what she was thinking now (in fact she looked pretty chuffed about it.) He liked the way the awards were given for a writer's body of work - rather than a single book - and although (and I'm paraphrasing here) he felt his individual books had flaws, together they added up to something.

After another glass or two of wine and some sweet somethings (oh how those dental nurses would have frowned), the gathered glitterati tip-toed out of the murder house and down the steep drive. Penguin's Geoff Walker was last seen climbing over the fence to escape because the policeman who opened and closed the gate had disappeared. And there on the other side trying to get back in was his internationally-famous author, and the brand-new recipient of a PM Award, muttering about having left something behind.

I left them there, dear reader, clicked my teeth together and headed home.

A Breed Apart

This book is audacious because the author is audacious and because her first novel A Breed of Women published in 1979 was considered wildly audacious. With Sharon Crosbie telling her radio listeners: ‘Darlings I’ve got the book we’ve all been waiting for. This book is about us. We’re all in it', A Breed of Women by Fiona Kidman was snapped up by 9,000 buyers in three days and continued to sell well for years afterwards.

After reading At the End of Darwin Road (2008) I had to read A Breed of Women, and what do you know, I found a first edition hardback for sale on Trademe for $9 today. So I bought it. [It’s one of the first 9,000 hopefully.] The Book Council website tells us A Breed of Women is the story of an unconventional young woman’s confrontations with a narrow-minded small town society characterised by the grim judgment, ‘There’s no way outa Ohaka, ’cept by flying young, or dying here.’

Fiona knows small town NZ society – she was in it in Kerikeri as a child, Waipu as a teen and Rotorua as a young woman. In her memoir, she talks of the trouble she had conforming. Always feeling like an outsider looking in, she yearned to be a real writer and worked her way up from book reviewer through play and script writer to poet to novelist. It was tough going at times and Fiona has met with her fair share of humiliation, antagonism and maliciousness along the way, but she stuck to her knitting --actually she confesses to disliking knitting -- make that her two-finger typing, and is now a Dame and in 2006 she was the Katherine Mansfield fellow in Menton.

At the End of Darwin Road is the first part of Fiona’s memoir. It explores her life up to the publication of Mandarin Summer and the death of her father, but it also skips back and forward to the place she wrote the book: Menton France. It is a fascinating, unsettling and moving exploration of a woman writer at a time in New Zealand of tremendous social change, when being a woman writer was more of a dream than a reality. Fiona is a recent friend of mine [both of us have written novels set on Arapawa Island which led to the meeting], but until I read At the End of Darwin Road I didn’t know how privileged I was to be able to say that. Recommended.