NZ Book Award Winners

The winners - the wonderful winners - were announced last night at the annual shindig of authors, publishers, booksellers and interested others.

My congrats to them all, but especially to Chris Bourke for his thoughtful book on NZ music history 'Blue Smoke' which scored a hat-trick: NZ Post Book of the Year, the General Non-Fiction Award and the People's Choice Award.  And to modest, hard-working Southerner Laurence Fearnley who I've got to know because she's a Penguin author too (my one novel to her seven! you can see why I say 'hard-working')  and who won the Best Fiction Award for The Hut Builder.

I stood backstage with Laurence in 2008 waiting for the Fiction winner to be announced. There were four of us finalists that year (controversially, people wanted five) but Charlotte Grimshaw was overseas and the fourth, Alice Tawhai, had sent a proxy as she likes to remain anonymous. Anyway, we were standing there nervously in the half-dark waiting for the result to be read out, and then Laurence's name was called. There was a muddly moment as we realised she was Fiction runner-up and I pushed her gently towards the stage. Then Charlotte Grimshaw was announced winner of the Fiction Prize, and then the Medal for Fiction and Poetry, if I remember rightly. She thanked everyone via video on a giant screen.

I bet Laurence is thrilled to bits to have it the other way round this year.

All the winners are here.

Ast-on-ish-ing

Still reeling after a wonderful night at the Montana Awards. What a fantastic night. All bells and whistles, glitter and glamour, authors and booksellers, publishers and journalists.

Since posting earlier I've found a piccy of the glittery plunging thing I wore (it was on the Booksellers website with all the other photos) but you can't really see the glitter here, which is a shame. I am standing with the NZSA's Paul Smith after collecting the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction which Rachael King won last year for The Sound of Butterflies.

An exciting moment. I felt outrageously happy and proud. And then, while I was admiring my gift bottle of Montana wine and about to open the envelope to look at the lovely cheque, they announced the Readers Choice Award.... and, dear readers, it was The Blue. I gaped, my husband gulped his wine, my publisher swallowed his fork.

As-ton-ish-ing. A-maz-ing. W-on-der-ful.

Thank you to all the people who voted. Thank you to all my readers especially the ones who took a punt on The Blue in the early days when it was an unknown quantity.

Thank you to the readers who grab my arm outside the greengrocers and say 'I'm half way through and I love the bit where you desribe the gulls like washing', the ones who buy book after book for presents for their friends, the ones at the libraries who ask me if I think Micky's okay now, the ones who say they know the place I've written about that's how it is.

In the end this novel-writing thing is all about the book and the reader and the solitary act of reading.

Thank you to Montana and Booksellers for the Readers Choice Award and for the most wonderful evening. And to NZSA and Hubert Church for the Best First Book Award.

Congratulations to Charlotte Grimshaw for winning the Fiction and Poetry gong for Opportunity which is a startling collection of stories that verges on the genius, and to Laurence Fearnley who was a deserved fiction runnerup. Congrats too to Janet Hunt for Wetlands which won the Non-Fiction medal. And to all the rest.

More on the awards at Beattie's bookblog. And elsewhere no doubt.