Books by Massey staff and graduates selected for the 2018 Ockham NZ Book Awards.
Four books by Massey authors have been the longlisted for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. They are historians Professor Michael Belgrave and Dr Adam Claasen, and Master of Creative Writing graduates, poet Sue Wootton and novelist Bonnie Etherington.
The authors, all either staff or graduates from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, are represented in three of the awards’ four categories, and one is published by Massey University Press.
Professor Belgrave’s book, Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864-1885 (Auckland University Press) is a contender for the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Fiction.
The book brings to life the period following the Battle of Orakau when the Waikato region operated as an independent territory under Tāwhiao, the second Māori King.
His previous books include Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland University Press, 2005) and From Empire’s Servant to Global Citizen: A History of Massey University (Massey University Press, 2016). He is also co-author of Social policy in Aotearoa New Zealand (Oxford University Press, 2008) and co-editor of The Treaty on the Ground: Where We Are Headed, and Why It Matters (Massey University Press, 2017).
Dr Claasen’s book, Fearless (Massey University Press) is in the same category. His illustrated book tells the extraordinary and little-known story of New Zealand’s daring aviation pioneers of WWI. Dr Claasen is a senior lecturer in history in the School of Humanities at the Auckland campus.
Master of Creative Writing graduate Bonnie Etherington’s debut novel The Earth Cries Out (Vintage Penguin, Random House) is set on the Indonesian island of West Papua where she spent a large part of her childhood. Her book has been selected for the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize, the biggest among the categories at $50,000.
She began writing the book for her Master of Creative Writing in the School of English and Media Studies.
Sue Wootton’s book The Yield (Otago University Press) is in the Poetry Award section. A poet and fiction author who also writes for children and has published five collections of poetry, a short story collection and a novel, Ms Wootton worked on her novel Strip as part of her Master of Creative Writing in 2013.
The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are the country’s premier literary honours for books written by New Zealander. First established in 1968 as the Wattie Book Awards (later the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards), they have also been known as the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the New Zealand Post Book Awards.
Ten books are selected for each of the four categories, including Illustrated Non-Fiction, with winners announced at the Auckland Writers Festival in May. Winners of the other three main categories receive $10,000. There are also the four Best First Book awards, and a Māori language award for books written entirely in te reo Māori.