Auē! The story behind a modern literary classic

From creating a festival of dreams to nurturing a space for Māori storytelling, from establishing an anarchist press to crafting an Ockham-shortlisted novel on a wild Hokitika beach - with plenty of honest how-to and insider intel in between - Everything I Know About Books weaves together 70 candid, funny, thought-provoking and powerful pieces from our leading writers, poets, publishers, booksellers, festival makers, artists, reviewers, editors and more, in a taonga for our times. It blends genres, including advice, poems, listicles, creative insights, graphic pieces and personal reflections, making it a book readers can dip in and out of easily - something for everyone interested in publishing in Aotearoa. In this extract, Mary McCallum, of Mākaro Press explains how she came to publish Auē! by Becky Manawatu.

The first email from Becky Manawatu was in April 2016. She was living in Frankfurt, Germany, and curious to know if we were taking submissions. 'I have an 85,000 word manuscript,' she wrote. 'It is about separation, love and loss.'

We were flat out with no time to reply. Paul Stewart and I are Mākaro Press. There's no one else. We'd only been going three years, working out of a shoebox office in Wellington. Six weeks on, Becky sent the manuscript. My reply was excruciating in its brevity: 'Ok.' Five months later, still waiting for a response from us, she emailed three chapters she'd reworked.

'Now it is Pluck,' she said. 'The very essence of a story of two brothers learning how to be orphans.'

I read the chapters over the new year, and on 4 January 2017 I emailed, 'I think you have talent as a writer and the audacity of a novelist,' and asked for the revised manuscript. Becky delivered it by hand two weeks later. She was back in Aotearoa, living in Waimangaroa on the West Coast, and had made the trip because she wanted me to see her face to face.

The first chapter of Pluck began much like the chapter in the book we published as Auē: the orphan brothers at the Kaikōura farm, smart-mouthed Beth, the dog, the weka with the baby rabbit. The language was snap-fresh but also like an incantation, summoning the oldest stories to take us there, and the urgent, stripped-back storytelling cohered in a blink to invoke images of beauty or ugliness. She had me four lines in at, 'You'll love it, there are cows!'

But as the story played out there were problems with the plot and the complex structure had confusing threads; there were issues with tenses, points of view. It was ambitious and needed work. I sent Becky my feedback and said if she'd sort these things we'd be happy for her to resubmit.

Two months passed, and we were working on Renée's memoir These Two Hands when Becky's next revision arrived. I felt the time was right for two Pākehā publishers to get an assessment by a Māori reader. Becky is Kāi Tahu. Her novel is about Māori, some living in gangs.

Renée is Ngāti Kahungunu, one of this country's notable kaituhi and a writing teacher and mentor. I asked her for a reader report. Did she know much about gangs? 'I lived in Wairoa,' she said. She gave Pluck her blessing, said the story was compelling and Becky knew what she was doing.

Becky had started writing the novel in Germany, where her husband, Tim, was playing professional rugby. She wrote to take herself back home and to work through her grief over the murder of her ten-year-old cousin Glen Bo by his stepfather. She'd re-entered the story that had devastated her childhood and given another small boy, Ari, a way out.

We signed a contract to publish in 2019.

The next time Becky came to the office it was to work on the edits with me, kanohi ki te kanohi. She writes urgently, obsessively, and thrives on editing, wants to learn. For example, I thought Ārama's character needed more to make him tick, so Becky invented the plasters, the way the boy puts them on himself when he's hurting inside.

In two weeks she wove the plasters through the novel.

Auē went through five rounds of editing. It was a late intervention by Renée that saw the title change from Pluck. 'It's too English,' she said. 'Becky's book is a Māori book.' There was a frantic last-minute rechristening. Auē. To cry, howl, groan.

Paul typeset the text. One more editorial pass, and a proofread, and we gave the printers the go-ahead to print five hundred copies.

The third time I saw Becky was at the launch, on a clifftop at Cape Foulwind on 7 September 2019. Tim arrived from playing rugby for Buller. Becky's dad, Larry, cooked up the biggest plate of whitebait fritters I'd ever seen. Her tāua was there, and her mum from Nelson. Becky was so nervous she shook like a leaf.

Sales around the country were okay. There weren't a lot of reviews. Catherine Woulfe of The Spinoff wrote that Auē 'hasn't had a lot of attention yet, certainly no prizes, but holy shit, it should'. Then Steve Braunias at Newsroom ran an essay of Becky's called: 'The novelist whose sister married into the Mongrel Mob'. She wrote about how she got a call from her Mob brother-in-law after Auē came out. 'That was a good book,' he'd said. 'I wanted to go into that book and smash some of those guys' heads in.'

Sales went crazy.

We sold copies off our website to people who worked for concrete and trucking businesses and lived in small communities I'd never heard of. Then Braunias declared it the best book of 2019, 'maybe even the most successfully achieved portrayal of underclass New Zealand life since Once Were Warriors'.

We are lucky our Auckland printer, Ligare, can turn around a print run in a week, because we needed more books fast. Account manager Sharon Simmons wears shorts and track shoes and runs as she works. Her dad cuts the books and takes them across town in his van to our distributors, Bateman Books, who fly them out to bookshops.

I texted Becky at just after midnight on 29 January 2020 to tell her she was longlisted for an Ockham award-the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, worth a life-changing $55K. Then came the shortlisting, and a sense of unreality set in. Becky was a debut Māori woman writer in a line-up of established Pākehā male writers. What would winning mean, for Becky, for us? Were we up to it? We felt afraid.

Sales grew exponentially with the news, so did the book reviews. Kiran Dass said Auē gave her a 'book hangover' and predicted people would be talking about in decades to come. We were reprinting again when the country went into lockdown.

The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards went online, which meant we were at home in slippers by the fire when they read out Becky's name as winner of one of the best first book awards. And then there she was, beaming out from Waimangaroa, family around her, dad Larry at the back, whānau photos in shot: winner of the top fiction prize in Aotearoa.

Two weeks later Jo McColl, co-owner of Unity Books, phoned. Auē was selling nationally at a rate of a thousand copies a week. We'd reprinted twice since the awards but were barely keeping up with demand. Booksellers were antsy. In forty-two years of bookselling, Jo said, she'd seen few other books that appealed to such a broad cross-section of readers-Once Were Warriors and Mr Pip were two.

'I believe that Auē is going to sell in quantities rarely seen in New Zealand fiction,' she said. 'You have a winner on your hands-please go big and print bravely.'

So we did. A terrifying decision for a small press, but we were supported by a modest grant from Creative New Zealand, and our printers, who agreed to wait for payment until the post-award sales returns were in the bank.

Auē was in the bestsellers lists for three and a half years. We've sold 26,500 copies at the time of writing, printing the last run offshore, and it hasn't stopped.

After the Ockhams, Auē won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize. Through our hard-working agent, High Spot Literary, we sold the worldwide English language rights to Scribe and an option on the film and TV rights. Becky's book is being published in French, Bulgarian, Turkish and Spanish. In 2024 we release the sequel, Kataraina.

I can't remember who first told me Auē was a modern classic. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it means a book that endures beyond its expected shelf life because it continues to sell and has broad appeal and influence. There's no doubt about the sales and appeal of Auē, and that Māori writers are filling more space now in te ao pukapuka. Becky was the first in eight years to win the top fiction prize, but only two years later both the Ockham fiction awards were won by Māori, and in 2023 they numbered half the fiction shortlist.

Auē isn't the reason for this trend, but its success must have given confidence to writers, publishers, booksellers and readers heading in the same direction.

How do you make a modern classic? Wouldn't every publisher love to know! Luck and timing play a huge part, but I'd say there are ways to help it happen: trust your instincts, be nimble, take risks, but take time when it matters, and listen to your book community-especially those passionate people who've been at it a while. Believe in your books. Love your authors. Respect your readers. Enjoy the cows.

This extract was originally published on Kete Books and is reproduced here with kind permission.