THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

The New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa (PEN NZ Inc) congratulates Lee Murray on winning the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize with her manuscript 'Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud'.  The prize was created by the NZSA and the Solomon family to fulfil the wishes of Laura Solomon, a novelist, poet and playwright who was a longstanding member of NZSA and a beloved member of the Solomon family. It awards new writing of ‘unique and original vision‘ with a cash prize of $2000 and a publishing contract with The Cuba Press. Publication will be early 2024. We also congratulate Melanie Kwang who is the runner-up, winning a cash prize of $1000 with her manuscript Faultlines. The winning manuscript, Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is a series of interconnected narrative prose-poems re-imagined from real-life narratives of the Chinese women’s diaspora in Aotearoa and linked through the classic mythology of the Chinese shapeshifting nine-tailed fox spirit, húl...

New Zealand writer Catherine Chidgey has won the top prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.  Announced at the Aotea Centre last night, she won for her novel 'The Axeman's Carnival'. It's actually the second time Chidgey has won the $64,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fictio n - the first time was in 2017 for 'The Wish Child'.   Both books are published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. 'The Axeman’s Carnival' – a page-turning novel of depth, pathos and humanity that skilfully infuses comedy with a building sense of menace, narrated by a precocious magpie called Tama. Ms Chidgey received the fiction prize ahead of screenwriter and author Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) (Better the Blood); historian and novelist Monty Soutar (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, Ngāti Kahungunu) (Kāwai: For Such a Time as This); and sailor and novelist Cristina Sanders (Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant). The Fictio...

The biggest night of the New Zealand literary year unfolds as the winners of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for 2023 are announced live on stage, presided over by MC Jack Tame. After the announcement of the Best First Book winners (supported by Mātātuhi Foundation), a cast of New Zealand’s finest writers takes the stage to read from their work before the judges reveal their picks for the General Non-Fiction Award, the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction, and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.  Finalists General Non-Fiction Award: Melinda Webber (Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whakaue) and Te Kapua O’Connor (Ngāti Kurī, Pohūtiare); Paul Diamond (Ngāti Hauā, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi); Noelle McCarthy; Ned Fletcher. Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry: Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki); Joanna Cho; Anahera Maire Gildea (Ngāti Tukorehe); Khadro Mohamed. Booksellers Aotea...

New Zealand’s most-anticipated festival of ideas unveils 2023 programme – a triumphant return of international literary giants and 160 in-person events. The Auckland Writers Festival tonight unveiled the full programme for its 23rd Festival, with 160 live events in Auckland over six days, 16 – 21 May 2023. Every year the Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi O Tāmaki sets the cultural agenda in Aotearoa, as the world’s best writers and thinkers arrive in Auckland for one week only, in a series of public eventsto inspire, entertain and challenge the status quo. This year’s festival marks the first time in over three years that international authors will return in an all-live programme on-stage in central Auckland. The week-long celebration of books, authors and ideas will include ticketed and free events in the Aotea Centre and select venues across the city. Festivalgoers will hear from outstanding fiction and non-fiction authors, musicians, scientists, artists, historians, innovators, and ...

Otto Bader, Pansy Williams and Clem Bright live in the small mining town of Blackball on the West Coast, shaped by stories and the dream of a better, more equal society to come. But the First World War erupts and Otto, being of German descent, is torn from his family and the love of his life, Pansy, to endure the war interned as an enemy alien on Somes Island in Wellington Harbour.  His suffering with the other internees, the culture of brutality and abuse of power by those in charge, is both chilling and truthful, and all the more poignant by taking place within sight of the capital city. Both his present and his future appear to be stolen from him. Pansy, pregnant, marries good, kind Clem, who then betrays his socialist principles by enlisting.  Love, loss and abandonment haunt both Otto and Pansy, with reverberations far into the future. Lena is their child. Spirited, clever and perceptive, she tells her own story of growing up in the close-knit Bright family and the change...

From Cairo to Takapuna, Athens to Istanbul, 'How To Be A Bad Muslim' maps the personal and public experience of being Muslim through essays on identity, Islamophobia, surveillance, migration and language. Traversing storytelling, memoir, journalism and humour, Hassan speaks authentically and piercingly on mental health, grief and loss, while weaving memories of an Egyptian immigrant fighting childhood bullies, listening to life-saving ‘90s grunge and auditioning for vaguely-ethnic roles in a certain pirate movie franchise. At once funny and chilling, elegiac and eye-opening, this is a must-read book from a powerfully talented writer. March 15, 2019, came as a shock to many of us in Aotearoa.  We, never, in our wildest dreams even considered that our Muslim Communities were at risk in the ways we later learned.  White supremacy and anti-Muslim sentiment had been bubbling under the surface, of course.  But it was there like casual racism against any ethnic group - at least ...

Dame Fiona Kidman Tonight at the Alexander Turnbull Library, esteemed writer Dame Fiona Kidman launched Redmer Yska's new book 'Katherine Mansfield's Europe - Station to Station' (OUP).  Redmer Yska & Makaro Press' Mary McCallum Beautifully written and illustrated, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost story. Guided by Mansfield’s journals and letters, author Redmer Yska pursues the traces of her restless journeying in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and – a century ago this year – died. Along the way, he meets a cast of present-day Mansfield devotees who help shape his understanding of the impressions Mansfield left on their territories and how she is formally (and informally) commemorated in Europe. In Katherine Mansfield’s Europe, Yska takes us to the villas, pensions, hotels, spas, railway stations, churches, towns, beaches and cities where Mansfield wrote some of ...