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.
The New Ships by Duignan Kate
$30.00 NZD
Category: Fiction | Reading Level: near fine
Peter Collie is adrift in the wake of his wife's death. His attempts to understand the turn his life has taken lead him back to the past, to dismaying events on an Amsterdam houseboat in the seventies, returning to New Zealand and meeting Moira, an amateur painter who carried secrets of her own, and to ...Show more
The New Zealand Horse by Deborah Coddington
$90.00 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction
Second hand. A magnificent tribute to the New Zealand horse, documenting its pivotal role in the development of the early colony, in farming, transport, war, sport and in our affections. Writer Deborah Coddington and photographer Jane Ussher capture the strength, beauty and mystery of the horse across ...Show more
The Ones Who Keep Quiet by David Howard
$25.00 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: Fine
The ones who keep quiet for the longest are the dead, yet there are echoes of them everywhere. A turn of the head brings a glimpse of a Victorian banker retrieving his top hat from the gutter. A walk across a bridge lets you pass the ghosts of a Catholic saint, a Marxist martyr, and a boy with a tin dru ...Show more
The Yield by Sue Wootton
$25.00 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: Very Good
Wootton addresses subjects as various as the fraught relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering, the disintegration of the polar icecaps, the energizing power of solitude and the rewarding demands of creativity and love. This is a collection about give and take, loss and gain; ab ...Show more
There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime by Kennedy Erik
$25.00 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine
Layering comedy over insight over rue and pathos over comedy, mixing its flexible couplets with beautifully spiky free verse, Erik Kennedy's first collection should climb up all the right charts: his phrases can go anywhere, then come back, and he has figured out how to sound both trustworthy and nonplu ...Show more
Therese Lloyd - The Facts by Therese Lloyd
$22.50 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: very good
She is made of blood she raises herself up to be seen The superb second book by the author of the acclaimed 2013 collection Other Animals traces the course of a failing marriage, while illuminating the ways in which art and poetry are essential to life. Deeply felt and lyrically arresting, The Facts off ...Show more
This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman
$38.00 NZD
Category: Fiction | Reading Level: very good
An utterly compelling recreation of the events that led to one of the last executions in New Zealand. Albert Black, known as the 'jukebox killer', was only twenty when he was convicted of murdering another young man in a fight at a milk bar in Auckland on 26 July 1955. His crime fuelled growing moral pa ...Show more
Tightrope by Marsh Selina Tusitala
$27.99 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: Very Good
Built around the abyss, the tightrope, and the trick that we all have to perform to walk across it, Pasifika poetry warrior Selina Tusitala Marsh brings to life in Tightrope her ongoing dialogue with memory, life and death to find out whether 'stories' really can 'cure the incurable'. In Marsh's poetry, ...Show more
Totara by Simpson Phillip
$75.00 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction
Second hand. The 'mighty totara' is one of our most extraordinary trees. Among the biggest and oldest trees in the New Zealand forest, the heart of Maori carving and culture, trailing no. 8 wire as fence posts on settler farms, clambered up in the Pureora protests of the 1980's: the story of New Zealan ...Show more
Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds by Alison Jones; Kuni Jenkins
$39.99 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction
In early 1817 Tuai, a young Ngare Raumati chief from the Bay of Islands, set off for England. He was one of a number of Maori who, after encountering European explorers, traders and missionaries in New Zealand, seized opportunities to travel beyond their familiar shores to Australia, England and Europe ...Show more
Undreamed of ...: 50 Years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship by Priscilla Pitts; Andrea Hotere
$59.95 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction
In 1966 Michael Illingworth, whose oil painting Adam and Eve appears on the front cover of this book, was awarded the inaugural Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. For the first time in New Zealand a practicing artist was given a studio and paid a salary to make art for a whole year. Fifty years later, the Fra ...Show more
Vulgar Wasp by Lester Phil
$30.00 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction
They're ranked one of the world's worst invasive species. They're often described as pure evil. People use petrol bombs, flamethrowers and shotguns on them in acts of vengeance. Wasps are feared and hated by many of us, with good reason - they sting. For anyone who is allergic to their venom, a sting ca ...Show more