The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Shortlist for 2026 has been announced! Nicola Legat, spokesperson for the New Zealand Book Awards Trust (Te Ohu Tiaki i Te Rau Hiringa), says of this year’s shortlisted books: “It’s a very exciting finalist list – 16 titles that readers of any genre will enjoy. They have been beautifully crafted by their authors and produced with great care by their publishers. The Book Awards Trust salutes them all.”
Winners will be celebrated on 13 May at the Auckland Writers Festival.
To find out more about the shortlisted titles go to https://www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealand-book-awards/2023-awards/shortlist/
| Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction | ||
|---|---|---|
| All Her Lives | Ingrid Horrocks | Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women - all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward - and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms. It is Ingrid Horrocks's first work of fiction. |
| Hood's Landing | Laura Vincent | Featuring elderly lesbians, twins who aren't twins, and several dogs named Roger, Hoods Landing is about shoddy pasts, ambiguous futures and the imperfect bonds that tie family together. |
| How to Paint a Nude | Sam Mahon | The story centres around a Belarus refugee, Gregor, who fled his country to find freedom. Sam and Gregor meet weekly to discuss art's purpose, and critique Lukashenka from a distance, but the narrative's pervading enemy - the corporate world - lurks beneath the surface, wickedly described in the words of Sam's friend, architect Peter Beaven. |
| The Book of Guilt | Catherine Chidgey | Gradually surrendering its dark secrets, The Book of Guilt is a spellbinding novel from one of our greatest storytellers: a profoundly unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others. |
| Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry | ||
|---|---|---|
| Black Sugarcane | Nafanua Purcell Kersel | Within the line, within the word and even the letter, these poems speak to creation and translation, destruction and regeneration. |
| No Good | Sophie van Waardenberg | In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home. |
| Sick Power Trip | Erik Kennedy | Sick Power Trip is Erik Kennedy's most personal and vulnerable book yet. These are poems that tell us: the world is unwell, and sometimes writers are, too. Kennedy scrutinises the broken social contract and the dangerous actors who seem determined to dominate us, and writes with open eyes about long COVID and living wages, self-medication and sea temperatures. If it feels like we're stuck in a post-truth moment, Kennedy reminds us that some things remain true and vital: self-care, empathy, and solidarity. |
| Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts | Anna Jackson | A luminous exploration of thought by one of our most distinguished poets. Part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, part poetics, a book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as thought. |
| BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction | ||
|---|---|---|
| Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire | Charlotte Macdonald | A major work by a distinguished historian, Garrison World examines the lives of soldiers and families constituting the British military presence in New Zealand and other territories during the nineteenth century. |
| He Puawai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers | Philip Garnock-Jones | For gardeners and foragers, for bush walks and coffee tables, He Puawai is an inspirational natural history of the native flowers of Aotearoa. |
| Mark Adams: A Survey - He Kohinga Whakaahua | Sarah Farrar | This first-ever comprehensive survey of Mark Adams' work honours one of our most distinguished - and continually compelling - photographers. It includes photographs taken across the Pacific, the United Kingdom and Europe that explore the migration of artistic and cultural practices across the globe, and examine the role of museums, and photography itself, in this dynamic and ongoing cross-cultural exchange. |
| Mr Ward's Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street | Elizabeth Cox | In 1891, a remarkable map of Wellington was made by surveyor Thomas Ward. It recorded the footprint of every building, from Thorndon in the north and across the teeming, inner-city slums of Te Aro to Berhampore in the south. Updated regularly over the next 10 years, it detailed hotels, theatres, oyster saloons, brothels, shops, stables, Parliament, the remnants of Maori kainga, the Town Belt, the prisons, the 'lunatic asylum', the hospital and much more, in detail so particular that it went right down to the level of the street lights. Mr Ward's Map uses this giant map and historic images to tell marvellous stories about a vital capital city, its neighbourhoods and its people at the turn of the twentieth century. |
| General Non-Fiction Award | ||
|---|---|---|
| A Different Kind of Power | Jacinda Ardern | From the former prime minister of New Zealand, then the world's youngest female head of government and just the second to give birth in office, comes a deeply personal memoir chronicling her extraordinary rise and offering inspiration to a new generation of leaders. |
| Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa | Naomi Arnold | Award-winning journalist Naomi Arnold spends nearly nine months walking the length of New Zealand on Te Araroa, fulfilling a 20-year dream. On her own, she traverses mountains, rivers, cities and plains from summer to spring, walking on through days of thick mud, blazing sun and lightning storms, and into cold, starlit nights. Along the way she encounters colourful locals and travellers who delight and inspire her. An upbeat, fascinating and inspiring memoir of solitude, love and friendship, and the joys and pains to be found in the wilderness. |
| The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era | Peta Carey | The Hollows Boys is the real story of an extraordinary era in New Zealand history that will never be repeated, told with honesty and courage, against the magnificent backdrop of Fiordland National Park. |
| https://ubscan.co.nz/product/this-compulsion-in-us-essays/ | Tina Makereti | A series of frank and moving essays about the wahine who have shown her many ways of being a Maori woman, the pain and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism. |
