Polkinghorne, Ardern up for Ockham award

2026-01-28 - 16:04

Philip Polkinghorne and Jacinda Ardern, together at last. My character study Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century and Jacinda Ardern’s memoir A Different Kind of Power are up against each other in the longlist for the Ockham national book awards announced this morning at 5am. There are 42 other longlisted titles but I have led with news of my nomination in the nonfiction category as an indication of how extremely stoked I am to have made the cut. Nonfiction is an especially strong category in 2026. I think there are nine longlisted titles which have a realistic chance of winning the award, including Naomi Arnold’s wildly entertaining travel book of walking the Te Araroa trail in Northbound, Mark Forman’s major biography Tony Fomison, and Hardship and Hope: Stories of Resistance in the Fight Against Poverty in Aotearoa by that peerless journalist Rebecca Macfie. Judges have also selected The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project by Rosemary Baird, an outstanding work of social history. I’m surprised it wasn’t entered in the illustrated category—the pictures are amazing—but Baird’s story of working-class New Zealand reads like a novel, a kind of Coal Flat (Bill Pearson’s 1963 novel about coal miners) for our times. It could win. Lucy O’Hagan could win for her memoir Everything But the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale or Peta Carey could win for The Hollow Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era or Tina Makereti could win for her essays This Compulsion in Us. Jacinda Ardern could win, twice—she’s also up for best first book! Anyway a great year for nonfiction. All the more reason I’m very happy to sit at the elite table with my account of the Philip Polkinghorne murder trial. I will enjoy the distinction while it lasts: the shortlist of four books in each category is announced on March 4. The full longlists appear at the end of these further remarks. I am bewildered that Nick Ascroft’s poetry collection It’s What He Would Have Wanted failed to make the poetry longlist, but relieved that the equally bleedingly obvious work of near-genius, Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel, has made the cut. Her book featured a moving suite of poems about the tsunami that struck Samoa in 2009. Look at these small, powerful words: When aid came, it went to all of Sāmoa, not just the affected coasts. Dad offered swaps: beef bones from his freezer for tins of baked beans. Some of his village neighbours had been straining the beans and using only the sauce. Now they could eat supo povi and he could fill his cupboard and belly with Wattie’s beans— cooked and canned only two blocks from my house in Hastings. As for the illustrated category, it conforms to my long-held view that Ockham judges routinely prefer the merely worthy to the frankly wonderful. I named my list of the 10 best illustrated books of the year in December. Precisely zero have made the Ockham cut. Zero! My selections included Central Otago Couture: The Eden Hore Collection with incredible photos of starving models in the barren Maniototo Plains by Derek Henderson, and Case Studies: A story of plant travel with mind-blowing photos of flowers inside glass cases by Mark Smith. Both were cleanly, attractively designed. Ockham judges preferences include the brutalist art book Whenua, reviewed by Peter Simpson in ReadingRoom yesterday: “It occurs to me that Whenua is an example of brutalism in book design: monumental, stark, handsome, formidable, if not especially reader-friendly. Everything is on a massive scale ... Is it over the top? I’m inclined to think so.” Fiction offers the biggest jar of money. Other category winners receive $12,000; the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for fiction hands over $65,000. Up until the longlist I viewed The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey as the runaway winner. She’s the best writer in the country at the top of her form. But judges have shown rigour and verve by selecting two books I completely, stupidly overlooked last year, both published by independent presses: Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent (Āporo Press) and Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed (Tender Press), and I’m now thinking they have a very real chance of making it through to the shortlist and posing a serious challenge to win the prize and all that loot. Chidgey’s novel was set in an imagined time in England. Vincent and Mohamed both set their books in contemporary New Zealand. They are responding to these times in this land. Well, in part. Before the Winter Ends is set in Wellington, Cairo, and Mogadishu. Sam Brooks went to town with a rave review of Hoods Landing in his Dramatic Pause newsletter: “It follows the extended Gordon whānau as they gather somewhere south of Auckland for matriarch Bufty’s birthday, with all of their various amounts of baggage and enthusiasm that comes with any mass family gathering. It’s a tremendous family drama; operatic in scope, intimately detailed, deeply funny, and so real it scratches a familiar itch.” There are also best first book awards at the Ockhams. There’s good prize money in that: $3000. In nonfiction, Jacinda Ardern is up against Manapōuri author Rosemary Baird. No shade on the ex-PM or her compelling if somewhat mist-on-the-lens memoir but I hope Baird wins it. I love that book. Huzzah to sponsors Ockham Residential, CNZ, Acorn Foundation, BookHub, Mātātuhi Foundation, and Mary and Peter Biggsy for making the awards happen. The Ockham New Zealand book awards are the most important register of the literary year. But actually the Ockhams are also an annual register of unhappiness. This year judges made their selections from 178 entries, meaning that 134 authors will wake up this morning to disappointment. It also marks a lot of money down the drain but which flows back to the sea: the fee for each entered title is $160, so the New Zealand Book Awards Trust, as co-ordinating body of the Ockhams, pockets $28,480 plus $4,272 GST. That should cover beer and cheese at the awards ceremony on May 13. Huzzah to all authors who have made it through to this first crucial step. The 2026 longlist is as follows. The titles in bold indicates the books I hope make the shortlist. Not think, expect, or anticipate: hope, that thing with feathers. The title in bold at the end of each category is the book I think might win. NONFICTION AWARD Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century by Steve Braunias (Allen & Unwin) A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, Penguin Random House) The Welcome of Strangers: A History of Southern Māori by Atholl Anderson (Bridget Williams Books and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu) 50 Years of the Waitangi Tribunal: Whakamana i te Tiriti edited by Carwyn Jones and Maria Bargh (Huia Publishers) The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project by Rosemary Baird (Canterbury University Press) Hardship and Hope: Stories of Resistance in the Fight Against Poverty in Aotearoa by Rebecca Macfie (Bridget Williams Books) The Hollow Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era by Peta Carey (Potton & Burton) Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist by Mark Forman (Auckland University Press) Ruth Dallas: A Writer’s Life by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press) This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makereti (Te Herenga Waka University Press) Everything But the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale by Lucy O’Hagan (Massey University Press) The Covid Response: A Scientist’s Account of New Zealand’s Pandemic and What Comes Next by Shaun Hendy (Bridget Williams Books) An Uncommon Land: From an Ancestral Past of Enclosure Towards a Regenerative Future by Catherine Knight (Totara Press) Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa by Naomi Arnold (HarperCollins) JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent (Āporo Press) Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed (Tender Press) Wonderland by Tracy Farr (The Cuba Press) All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks (Te Herenga Waka University Press) Empathy by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press) How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon (Ugly Hill Press) 1985 by Dominic Hoey (Penguin) The Last Living Cannibal by Airana Ngarewa (Moa Press) Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies (Te Herenga Waka University Press) The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press) BOOKHUB AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NONFICTION Books of Mana: 180 Māori-Authored Books of Significance edited by Jacinta Ruru, Angela Walhalla, and Jeanette Wikaira (Otago University Press) Mark Adams: A Survey – He Kohinga Whakaahua by Sarah Farrar (Massey University Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) Takoto ai te Marino: Selected Works 2018-2025 by Raukura Turei, Greta van der Star, Vanessa Green and Katie Kerr (Raukura Turei) Whenua edited by Felicity Milburn, Chloe Cull and Melanie Oliver (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū) He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers by Philip Garnock-Jones (Auckland University Press) Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson (Te Papa Press) Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street by Elizabeth Cox (Massey University Press) Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire by Charlotte Macdonald (Bridget Williams Books) The Collector: Thomas Cheeseman and the Making of the Auckland Museum by Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe (Massey University Press) Atlas of the New Zealand Wars: Volume One 1834-1864, Early Engagements to the Second Taranaki War by Derek Leask (Auckland University Press) BIGGSY AWARD FOR POETRY Standing on my Shadow by Serie Barford (Anahera Press) Joss: A History by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing) Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press) No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press) Giving Birth to my Father by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press) Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press) E kō, nō hea koe by Matariki Bennett (Dead Bird Books) If We Knew How to We Would by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press) Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press) Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Te Herenga Waka University Press)