Ockham award fiction finalists, (clockwise from top left) Laurence Fearnley, Tina Makereti, Damien Wilkins and Kirsty Gunn. Photo: RNZ
Four award-winning authors are in the running for New Zealand's biggest fiction prize.
This year's finalists for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards include former winners Laurence Fearnley, Kirsty Gunn and Damien Wilkins, alongside Commonwealth Writer's Prize winner Tina Makereti.
The four authors are competing for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, worth $65,000.
Fearnley's At The Grand Glacier Hotel tells the story of Libby, a woman recovering from cancer who is separated from her partner Curtis during a storm at the titular South Island hotel. Fearnley won the prize in 2011 for her novel The Hut Builder.
This year, Kirsty Gunn is nominated for her short story collection Pretty Ugly, after previously winning Book of the Year in 2013 with The Big Music.
Damien Wilkins' Delirious is about ex-cop Mary and retired librarian Pete moving into a retirement village years after the death of their son. Wilkins' last won the fiction award for The Miserables in 1994.
The Mires by Tina Makereti follows three neighbours with differing backgrounds and histories living in a coastal New Zealand town as they grapple with extremist views in their community.
"Whether set in the Scottish Highlands, at the Fox Glacier, or on the Kāpiti Coast, each of these finalists evoked a visceral and often lyrical sense of place," convenor of judges Thom Conroy said in a statement announcing the finalists.
Other nominees include:
For the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry:
Hopurangi - Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka by Robert Sullivan.
In the Half Light of a Dying Day by C.K. Stead.
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale.
Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer.
For the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction:
Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist by Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson.
Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer by Athol McCredie.
Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa by Matiu Baker, Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice.
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki.
For the General Non-Fiction Award:
Bad Archive by Flora Feltham.
Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku.
The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank.
The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation by Richard Shaw.
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