Patricia Grace

Read the official media release (including biographies).

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.

It is a milestone year for Ngā Kupu Ora 2011, the third Māori Book Awards. For the first time the awards will celebrate a winner for fiction, and a book written completely in te reo has taken out the Te Reo Māori category.

Tina Makereti has won the first-ever Fiction award for Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, a book of short stories that puts traditional Māori myths and legends into a contemporary context. Makereti is thrilled to be recognised for her first book.