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.
Gordon Walters: New Vision by Lucy Hammonds; Julia Waite; Laurence Simmons
$79.00 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction | Reading Level: New
A substantial publication, Gordon Walters : New Vision, is being co-published by Auckland Art Gallery and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery to mark the occasion of this exhibition.
Heloise by Mandy Hager
$38.00 NZD
Category: Fiction | Reading Level: very good
What happens when the 12th century's most famous French lovers are caught in the crossfire of factions, religious reform and blind ambition? Heloise is a determined young woman with an exceptional mind, longing to pursue learning rather than marriage or life as a cloistered nun. Her path inevitably cros ...Show more
Hillary's Antarctica - Adventure, exploration and establishing Scott Base by Nigel Watson
$49.99 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction | Reading Level: good-very good
Beautifully illustrated with Jane Ussher's photographs of the hut restoration in Antarctica, plus historic images and never-before-seen ephemera and diary entries, this is a treasure. Sir Edmund and New Zealand were supposed to be a support act to the British Commonwealth Antarctic crossing party. By he ...Show more
Hudson & Halls - The food of love by Drayton Joanne
$49.95 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction | Reading Level: very good
Hudson & Halls: The food of love is more than just a love story, though a love story it certainly is. It is a tale of two television chefs who helped change the bedrock bad attitudes of a nation in the 1970s and 80s to that unspoken thing - homosexuality. Peter Hudson and David Halls became reluctan ...Show more
Iceland by Dominic Hoey
$34.99 NZD
Category: Fiction
Office-worker Zlata hopes for a record deal so she can leave Auckland city. She meets Hamish, graffiti artist and part-time drug dealer. Surrounded by a makeshift family of friends and ex-lovers, their dreams of music, art and travel take shape. Iceland lays bare the reality of a generation trying to fi ...Show more
Mataatua Wharenui: Te Whare I Hoki Mai by Hirini Moko Mead
$50.00 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction
Mataatua wharenui is the most travelled Maori meeting house in the country. Built in 1875, it was taken to Australia, London and Otago before being returned to Whakatane after more than a century away. The story of Mataatua is part of the story of the desecration of Ngati Awa by the Crown and the fight ...Show more
Mazarine by Charlotte Grimshaw
$38.00 NZD
Category: Fiction | Reading Level: very good
From award-winning author Charlotte Grimshaw, this is a beautifully evocative, sensual portrayal of a woman's search for freedom and love. When her daughter vanishes during a heatwave in Europe, writer Frances Sinclair embarks on a hunt that takes her across continents and into her own past. What clues ...Show more
Memory Pieces by Maurice Gee
$35.00 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction
Sdecondhand. Memory Pieces is an intimate and evocative memoir in three parts. `Double Unit' tells the story of Maurice Gee's parents - Lyndahl Chapple Gee, a talented writer who for reasons that become clear never went on with a writing career, and Len Gee, a boxer, builder, and man's man. `Blind Ro ...Show more
New China Eyewitness by Beattie James
$59.99 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction | Reading Level: Near Fine
New China Eyewitness is the fascinating account of the 1956 visit to the People's Republic of China by a group of prominent New Zealanders - including Roger Duff, James Bertram, Evelyn Page, Angus Ross and Ormond Wilson - and of how Canterbury Museum came to acquire the largest collection of Chinese art ...Show more
Night Horse by Smither Elizabeth
$24.99 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: Near Fine
In Elizabeth Smither's eighteenth collection of poetry her words are as vital as ever. The poems take the everyday - mothers and daughters, cats and horses, books and bowls, slippers and shirts - and transform them into something fresh: sometimes surreal, sometimes funny, often enchanted. And throughout ...Show more
Phoney Wars: New Zealand Society in the Second World War by Stevan Eldred-Grigg:Hugh Eldred-Grigg
$49.95 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction
Phoney Wars looks at the lives of New Zealanders during the greatest armed struggle the world has ever seen: the Second World War. It is not a political, economic or military history; rather it explores what life was like during the war years for ordinary people living under the New Zealand flag. Stevan ...Show more
Poukahangatus by Tayi Tibble
$25.00 NZD
Category: Poetry
'This collection speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality. It dives through noir, whakamā and kitsch and emerges dripping with colour and liquor. There’s whakapapa, funk (in all its connotations) and fetishisation. Th ...Show more