What inspired you to write your Ockham-shortlisted book?

We've included a very brief bio for each author and, for those of you in Auckland, details of any sessions where they are appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival. Please also use the reading list links below to find out more and purchase their books.

Fiction

Damien Wilkins - Delirious

'I’ve always liked donated bench seats in public spaces. You read the plaque with the name of the person who died and then you sit down. There’s a tiny cameo of one such bench seat in my novel. The last few years have been hard for my family. My beloved older sister died and then my mother was struck down viciously by delirium which has never resolved. In many ways they were each other’s best friends. For ages I felt as though I was in a stupor. Setting these events in a fictional world allowed me to do something with the terror. Maybe just make an object—a sort of bench seat. Here, sit down.'

Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books and a creative writing professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Pūtahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. Writers Festival: Literature of Loss, Being a NZ Writer Today, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) – The Mires

'There were multiple inspirations for The Mires, but the book essentially springs from a concern for the ways in which our humanity might be in jeopardy. I think the earliest inception of it must have come from the pre-2020 campaigns to raise the refugee quota in New Zealand and white supremacist terrorist attacks occurring overseas at that time. What did it say about us, I wondered, that we could be so comfortable with our lot in Aotearoa? And I also thought about how important and invisible single parents are - it had long disturbed me the way single mothers are scapegoated and ignored. All of this is on a continuum with the way we live in our environments, so as I walked my dog each day and thought about the swamp under my feet, which was also mostly invisible, a story began to form.'

Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, and Pākehā), is the author of three acclaimed novels: Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings, The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, and The Mires. She also teaches a Master of Arts in Creative Writing workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Auckland Writers Festival: Tina Makereti and Becky Manawatu, Writing to Remember: Tina Makereti and Flora Feltham, Someone Saved My Life Tonight Nā Tētahi Ahau i Whakaora i Tēnei Pō, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Laurence Fearnley – At the Grand Glacier Hotel

'I wanted to set a novel in Westland, on the West Coast, that captured the atmosphere specific to that place: the proximity of the high mountains to the sea; the dark green, dense bush-covered slopes, and the thread of glacier and river that runs through it. The novel has a 'sound' theme so I was interested in natural sounds like rain, wind, running water as well as the beautiful silence you also find there. I find this area very inspiring in terms of its sensory qualities. On top of that I was inspired to write a female-led book, with a very gentle and tender tone, one where people care for one another, even strangers.'

Laurence Fearnley is an award-winning novelist who holds an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka University of Wellington.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Kirsty Gunn – Pretty Ugly

'Given the galloping predations of late capitalism and the scary global trend towards hard-on right wing politics I became unable to write anything but the stories in "Pretty Ugly". And for sure, there are some pretty ghastly people in these stories -just as they are in our communities and society -doing pretty ghastly things...They are horrible. But there are also -thank goodness -some shining acts of beauty and love tucked into this collection too. For the world is full of goodness. Going into the dark helped me find that again...'

Kirsty Gunn is an internationally published and award winning author of short stories, novel and essays that explore what it is to be human in the fleeting moments of our day to day lives. She is Research Professor at the University of Dundee, Associate Fellow of Merton and Brasenose Colleges, Oxford, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Royal Literary Fund, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Unsettling Fictions, Dark Tales Salon

Poetry

Emma Neale – Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit

'I came across a line from the poet Joseph Brodsky — ‘The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie’ — which complicated what I’d been thinking about the loss of honesty and authenticity in the public arena, in our era of ‘alternative facts’. I became obsessed with the lie, the fabrication, as a tool both of survival or camouflage and as a terrible, destructive force. I set out to write poems about this aspect of ourselves. Not all the poems in the collection deal with disguise and deception, however. They’re leavened by other work that looks at the nurturing instinct, love and compassion: the truths we’re still capable of, despite ourselves.'

Emma Neale is an award-winning novelist and poet. Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit is her seventh poetry collection, following To the Occupant (Otago University Press, 2019). A former editor of Landfall, she lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and works as a freelance editor for publishers in New Zealand and Australia.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Poetry and Music

Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) - Hopurangi - Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka

'I wrote this book as part of my life--reconnecting with our Kāi Tahu whānau at Puketeraki Marae in Karitāne, learning about the Maramataka as a way to navigate the energies of living well, and reflecting on the past and future as a person who belongs to many communities from the north (Ngāti Manu in Kāretu, Bay of Islands), our writing community, my new community in Oamaru, and my family who are based in Auckland, Wellington, and Australia. In short, the maramataka has scale, while the hopurangi or songcatcher-musical-instrument, and the poems, on smaller scales, give breath to that.'

Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) is an award-winning author of nine books of poetry as well as a graphic novel and an award-winning book of Māori legends for children. He is associate professor of creative writing at Massey University.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Poetry and Music

C.K Stead - In the Half Light of a Dying Day

'In the Half Light of a Dying Day began as a return, not to translations of the Roman poet Catullus, but ‘poems in the manner of’, which gave me a voice, a tone, a persona, I had used before. But while I was beginning to write this new sequence, Kay, my wife of many years, was diagnosed with cancer which threatened her life. So my Catullus needed a new partner. I gave her the name Kezia and the poems that followed trace her courage, her decline and death, and Catullus coping with the crisis, and learning to live without her. So the new sequence is autobiographical, but not ‘first person’, which I think partly explains any success it may have had.'

C. K. Stead is an award-winning novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2015–2017, has won the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Poetry and Music

Richard von Sturmer – Slender Volumes

'What inspired me to write Slender Volumes was my on-going exploration into new ways of telling stories. The 300 poems in Slender Volumes present 300 windows into the realm of the imagination. With so many poems, I could continually change the tone and perspective; from the transcendent to the mundane; from autobiographical accounts and sketches from life to fables and surrealistic vignettes. While working on Slender Volumes, I would write one seven-line poem per day. Each day provided me with a surprise, and I hope the reader will be engaged and delighted by this assembly of surprises.'

Richard von Sturmer is a writer, performer and filmmaker who is well known for having written the lyrics to Blam Blam Blam’s “There is No Depression in New Zealand.” He is a teacher of Zen Buddhism and the co-founder of the Auckland Zen Centre.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Poetry and Music

General Non-Fiction

Flora Feltham – Bad Archive

'Bad Archive is about many different things, but its core concern is memory, both individual and collective. Even more specifically, it turns out I’m obsessed with where memory lives. I want to know how memory attaches itself to the material world, both deliberately and accidentally, and what this means. This, I think, is why I wrote not just about archives, that deliberate house of memory, but also Wellington’s Southern Landfill, where people bury their old belongings, and Newtown New World, which is a shining beacon in my psychogeography of Wellington.'

Flora Feltham is a writer and weaver from Pōneke. She has an MA from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Writing to Remember: Tina Makereti and Flora Feltham, Debut of the Day: Flora Feltham

Una Cruickshank - The Chthonic Cycle

'I wrote the essays that make up The Chthonic Cycle over about ten years. A lot has changed in the world and in my own thinking during that time, so I chose to exclude a lot of existing writing that didn't seem thematically or stylistically linked (or that just felt "felt off"). The big motivating factor behind deciding to finally complete a solo collection was what people at the time were calling the Polycrisis and what I guess we are now just calling normal life. Climate crisis, the pandemic, the sudden rise of the far right, had me searching for an antidote to hopelessness. Writing about natural history in particular was intended as a form of escapism, but those present day human concerns inevitably seeped through into the book.'

Una Cruickshank has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and another earlier MA that she doesn’t talk about as much. She works at an audiovisual archive and haunts Wellington’s cinemas and libraries.
Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) - Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery

'Kāore te kūmara e kōrero mo tōna nei reka - a sweet potato never talks about how sweet it is! Maybe because it might instantly get eaten! I grew up among talented creatives, performers, story tellers, artists; they wove stories around me, and this book is about remembering them, how they shaped my life, how they inspired this telling. For decades, I preferred to write about myself as a shadow in short fiction. With a generous editor, and the aroha of friends and whānau who wondered if they’d be mentioned, we all got through it! And yes, Ōhinemutu village was my primary inspiration.'

Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) is the first female Māori Emeritus Professor from a university, with degrees from the University of Auckland and University of Waikato. Hina Toa is her sixth book.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Festival Gala Night: The Moment I Knew, Landmark LGBTQ+ Literature, Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery

Richard Shaw – The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation

The Unsettled emerged from the steady stream of messages - more than a dribble; not quite a wave – I started receiving after the publication of The Forgotten Coast. That book dealt with the disconcerting effects of learning that an ancestor had been part of the invasion of Parihaka and subsequently farmed on confiscated land in Taranaki. It turns out that plenty of other Pākehā are also unsettled when they piece together a more accurate account of the circumstances in which their people came here than the one they grew up with: The Unsettled is about those people’s attempts to get their family stories straight.

Writer and Professor of Politics at Massey University, Richard Shaw has recently released The Forgotten Coast, a memoir recollecting Taranaki in the times of the New Zealand Wars. He specialises in researching ministerial governance.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Illustrated Non-Fiction

Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson - Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist

'This book is the outcome of years of planning and is very much a collaborative project between the Edith Collier Trust and Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery. The reopening of the redeveloped Sarjeant Gallery in late 2024, which included a new exhibition of Collier’s work, provided the impetus to get it started. Once we had assembled our ‘dream team’ of writer Jill Trevelyan, editors Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson, together with the powerhouse of Massey University Press and the support of over 20 contributing writers, we had the perfect conditions to finally bring this project to fruition.'

Jill Trevelyan is a writer and curator; Jennifer Taylor works as Curator of Collections at the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui; and Greg Donson has been Curator and Programmes Manager at the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui since 2007.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Athol McCredie - Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer

'I found Leslie Adkin’s family photographs so warm, charming and funny when I came across them in the mid-1970s. And, like others, I fell for the love of his life, Maud. I put together an exhibition of his work that was very popular. But a book never occurred to me, and I wouldn’t have had the confidence to write one anyway. Four decades later, with a few books now under my belt, I still felt Adkin deserved a wider audience. So I resolved that there would be a book, even if I had to publish it myself.'

Author of 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlisted book NZ Photography Collected (2015), Athol McCredie is a curator of photography at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Matiu Baker (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Whakaue), Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice - Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa

'Te Ata o Tū was borne out of Rā Maumahara (2017-2018), an exhibition staged at Te Papa to coincide with the first National Day of Remembrance of the New Zealand Wars.

The development of the exhibition revealed the richness of Te Papa’s collections and highlighted the need for us to contribute to this important national conversation – to retell the New Zealand Wars stories through our taonga. In writing the book, we really wanted to reach a wider national audience and rebalance the Māori narrative through the powerful medium of taonga, complimented by the diverse range of voices in the companion essays.

Ka maumahara tonu tātou ki a rātou!'

Matiu Baker (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Whakaue) is Curator Mātauranga Māori at Te Papa and has a broad interest in the many areas of Mātauranga Māori; Katie Cooper is Curator New Zealand Histories and Cultures at Te Papa. Her research focus is the social and material history of nineteenth-century New Zealand; Michael Fitzgerald is a Te Papa Research Associate. He was a Curator of History at Te Papa and its predecessors (the Dominion and National Museums) from 1971 until his retirement in 2016; Rebecca Rice is Curator Historical New Zealand Art at Te Papa. She specialises in the field of colonial New Zealand art.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu), Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī) - Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art

Toi Te Mana is the book we all wished we had when studying Maori art at university. We had all done some work individually on books in the area, and when we realised we'd all be working at the University of Auckland, it seemed like the stars had aligned and the ancestors were trying to tell us something! We wanted a book that would show just how amazing Maori art is, and be really ambitious about what we could cover. We wanted to find out what was beyond those horizons. This was certainly our dream project!

Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) is a Māori art and architectural historian and professor of architecture at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland; Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is an associate professor in art history at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland; and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki CNZM (1943–2014; Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī) was an art historian specialising in Māori, New Zealand and European art.

Auckland Writers Festival: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art