Awards News

Last year Chris Bourke took home the country’s top literary honour – the New Zealand Post Book of the Year Award – for his work Blue Smoke: the Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964. This year he heads up the judging panel for the same award.

A respected writer, reviewer, music historian and radio producer, Chris is well known as a former long-time producer for Radio New Zealand National’s Saturday Morning programme and as a staff writer and arts and books editor for print publications including The Listener.

Entries open today for the nation’s most prestigious book awards: the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards and the New Zealand Post Book Awards 2012.

More than 2,000 entries are expected, from emerging and experienced authors across the country, but just a few will make it to the final shortlist.

Together the two awards reflect the diversity, depth, colour and flair of contemporary New Zealand writing.

Canterbury literary legend, Margaret Mahy and internationally-recognised Dunedin illustrator, David Elliot, have won the country’s most prestigious gong for children’s literature, The New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year Award for their picture book, The Moon & Farmer McPhee

A quarter of the 20 finalists in the 2011 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards have been written or illustrated by newcomers and this is reflected across all four categories – Picture Book, Junior Fiction, Young Adult Fiction and Non-fiction.

Calling all booksellers, publishers, authors, illustrators, librarians, teachers, parents and lovers of books for children and young adults.

We’ve just launched a brand new Facebook page for the New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards, and we’d love you to become a ‘fan’.