Ockham Book Awards
In 1996 the New Zealand Book Awards (1976-1995) and the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards (1968-1993) amalgamated to become the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
The winner of the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize is awarded $50,000, while the winners of each of the other three categories claim $10,000 each; in addition, there is a further prize of $2500 awarded for the Best First Book.
Shop the nominees in each category below.
A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield's Wellington by Redmer Yska
$39.95 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction | Reading Level: near fine
How does a city make a writer? Described by Fiona Kidman as a 'ravishing, immersing read', A Strange Beautiful Excitement is a 'wild ride' through the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield's childhood. From the grubby, wind-blasted streets of Thorndon to the hushed green valley of Karori, author Redmer Yska ...Show more
All This by Chance by Vincent O'Sullivan
$31.50 NZD
Category: Fiction | Reading Level: near fine
If we don't have the past in mind, it is merely history. If we do, it is still part of the present. Esther's grandparents first meet at a church dance in London in 1947. Stephen, a shy young Kiwi, has left to practise pharmacy on the other side of the world. Eva has grown up English, with no memory of t ...Show more
All of Us by Adrienne Jansen & Carina Gallegos
$22.00 NZD
Category: Poetry
In All of Us, established New Zealand author Adrienne Jansen and exciting new writer Carina Gallegos use poems and short prose to weave together the vibrant, expansive, and sometimes heart-wrenching stories of immigrants and people from refugee background in New Zealand today. Drawing on their time spe ...Show more
Anchor Stone by Tony Beyer
$39.95 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: very good
ANCHOR STONE by Tony Beyer is "a significant book by a significant poet" (Mark Young). It includes several longer works & a significant proportion which deliberately address issues relevant to contemporary concepts of New Zealand identity and culture. Importantly for the work of a senior pakeha poet ...Show more
Are Friends Electric? by Helen Heath
$22.50 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine
Are Friends Electric? offers a vivid and moving vision of a past, present and future mediated by technology. The first part of Helen Heath's bold new collection is comprised largely of found poems which emerge from conversations about sex bots, people who feel an intimate love for bridges, fences and bu ...Show more
Aspiring Daybook: The Diary of Elsie Winslow by Annabel Wilson
$25.00 NZD
Category: Poetry
In Aspiring Daybook, poet Annabel Wilson tells of a year in the life Elsie Winslow, who has just returned from Europe to Wanaka to take care of her terminally ill brother and finds herself thinking about love in ways she didn't expect. Like the mountains that surround her and the lake that greets her ev ...Show more
Baby by Annaleese Jochems
$30.00 NZD
Category: Fiction | Reading Level: very good
A Winner in Ockhams New Zealand Book Awards - Best First Book Award for Fiction 2018. Cynthia is twenty-one, bored and desperately waiting for something big to happen when her bootcamp instructor, the striking Anahera, suggests they run away together. With stolen money and a dog in tow they buy 'Baby', ...Show more
Birdstories: A History of the Birds of New Zealand by Geoff Norman
$59.99 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction | Reading Level: very good
A fascinating, in-depth account of New Zealand's birds, which spans their discovery, their place in both Pakeha and Maori worlds, their survival and conservation, and the illustrations and art they have inspired. In 1872, the first instalments of Walter Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand ap ...Show more
Caroline's Bikini by Kirsty Gunn
$45.00 NZD
Category: Fiction
A gin-fueled love story with one part One Day mixed with one part Zadie Smith and a splash of Ali Smith. Included in the Guardian's "Top Ten books about unrequited love" "Alright" I said, "I'll try..." This is how Emily Stuart opens her intricate tale of a classic love affair that becomes Caroli ...Show more
Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen's Land by Kristyn Harman
$35.00 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction
Secondhand. Everyone knows Australia was once a penal colony, but few realise that New Zealand prisoners were sent there. During the mid-nineteenth century at least 110 people were transported from New Zealand to serve time as convict labourers in the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).
Dancing With the King - The rise and fall of the King Country 1864-1885 by Belgrave Michael
$65.00 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction | Reading Level: near fine
After the battle of Orakau in 1864 and the end of the war in the Waikato, Tawhiao, the second Maori King, and his supporters were forced into an armed isolation in the Rohe Potae, the King Country. For the next twenty years, the King Country operated as an independent state - a land governed by the Maor ...Show more
Dear Oliver by Peter Wells
$39.99 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction | Reading Level: very good
When writer and historian Peter Wells found a cache of family letters amongst his elderly mother's effects, he realised that he had the means of retracing the history of a not-untypical family swept out to New Zealand during the great nineteenth-century human diaspora from Britain. His family experience ...Show more