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.
Walking to Jutland Street by Michael Steven
$27.50 NZD
Category: Poetry
Walking to Jutland Street is the impressive frst book-length collection by up-and-coming Auckland-based poet Michael Steven. The title refers to Dunedins industrial wharf precinct where some of the poets friends shared a flat in 2010. A poem about friendship in the face of the other, Walking to Jutland ...Show more
Wanted - The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor by Bronwyn Holloway-Smith (ed.)
$79.99 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction | Reading Level: very good
Mervyn Taylor - wood engraver, painter, illustrator, sculptor and designer - was one of the most celebrated New Zealand artists of the 1930s to 1960s. He was highly connected to modernism and nationalism as it was expressed in New Zealand art and literature of the period. In the 1960s he created twelve ...Show more
We Can Make a Life by Chessie Henry
$35.00 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction | Reading Level: very good
Hours after the 2011 Christchuch Earthquake, Kaikoura-based doctor Chris Henry crawled through the burning CTV building to rescue those who were trapped. Six years later, his daughter Chessie interviews him in an attempt to understand the trauma that led her father to burnout, in the process unravelling ...Show more
What Is Left Behind by Tom Weston
$24.99 NZD
Category: Poetry
If Allen Curnow was the stony and austere godhead of New Zealand literary modernism, then Tom Weston (along with his close contemporary David Howard) are tending to the altar, counting the mala beads, and ensuring the continuation of the elder's example. It is something of a study, to observe how Weston ...Show more
Whatever it Takes - Pacific Films and John O'Shea 1948-2000 by John Reid
$60.00 NZD
Category: Illustrated Non-Fiction | Reading Level: very good
Pacific Films was founded on the belief that without locally made feature films, a country imperils its very identity. Led by its idiosyncratic producer John O'Shea, the story of Pacific Films begins at the emergence of a New Zealand national cinema in the second half of the twentieth century, when Paci ...Show more
Winter Eyes by Harry Ricketts
$25.00 NZD
Category: Poetry | Reading Level: near fine
Poetry as comfort, poetry as confrontation. In Winter Eyes Harry Ricketts reaches into past and future, with other writers and artists - from Kipling to Dylan, Austen to Frame - in the crosscurrents. These are poems of friendship, of love's stranglehold, of the streets and buildings where history played ...Show more
With Them Through Hell by Rogers Anna
$65.00 NZD
Category: Non-Fiction | Reading Level: near fine
Secondhand. Signed by the author. The thousands of New Zealand men who fought in the First World War went through hell. And right beside them was another fighting force, armed with scalpels, bandages and drugs. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, stretcher-bearers, orderlies and ambulance drivers,dentists, ch ...Show more