The results are in and what a night it was — we are sending a warm congratulations to all the outstanding award-winners!
Taking home the top prize — the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and a whopping $65,000 — is Ingrid Horrocks for her ‘outrageously good’ short story collection, All Her Lives (Te Herenga Waka University Press), following the lives of nine women. Spanning generations and continents, it weaves together women shaped by love, politics, motherhood and defiance — from the gardens of Plunket founder Truby King to Berlin’s queer underground to the frontlines of climate rebellion. Shadowed by Mary Wollstonecraft, Ingrid Horrocks’s debut novel is a vast and intimate exploration of everything women inherit, sacrifice and carry forward.
The BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction goes to Mr Ward’s Maps by Elizabeth Cox (Massey University Press) — a fascinating exploration of Victorian Wellington through the lens of a truly one-of-a-kind map. In 1891, surveyor Thomas Ward mapped every corner of Wellington — its hotels, theatres, slums, kāinga, brothels and street lights — capturing a capital city in extraordinary detail. Luxuriously produced with a cloth case and fold-out jacket, Mr Ward’s Map uses this remarkable document and historic imagery to illuminate the neighbourhoods and lives of turn-of-the-century Wellington.
Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry was awarded to Nafanua Purcell Kersel for Black Sugarcane (Te Herenga Waka University Press). It’s a landmark debut, restless in form, generous in spirit. Ricocheting from light to dark, these poems move through Samoan mythology, erasure, grief and regeneration, responding to both a seminal essay by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi and the devastating 2009 tsunami. Shapeshifting, inevitable and deeply alive.
Tina Makereti wins the General Non-Fiction Award for This Compulsion in Us (Te Herenga Waka University Press), her first book of non-fiction. Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives — teacher, daughter, parent, wahine Māori — across essays that are lyrical, frank and unflinching. From the wāhine who shaped her to breast cancer, alcoholism and the transformative power of art, This Compulsion In Us is an unforgettable portrait of identity, survival and the stories that make us.
Te Āhua o Ngā Kupu Whakaari a Te Kooti by Tā Pou Temara (Auckland University Press) wins Mūrau o te Tuhi – Māori Language Award. A significant scholarly work that examines the depth, authority, and enduring power of kupu whakaari and whakataukī, and the intimate connections to faith, land, history, and people. Structured metaphorically as a whare tūpuna, the book guides the reader from the foundations of the whare through to its heart, revealing the sacred nature of language through whakataukī, kupu whakaari, waiata, and named houses of Te Kooti Arikirangi Turuki.
Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Awards
Hubert Church Prize for Fiction: Pastoral Care by John Prins (Otago University Press)
Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry: No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press)
Judith Binney Prize for Illustrated Non-Fiction: He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers by Philip Garnock-Jones (Auckland University Press)
E.H. McCormick Prize for General Non-Fiction: A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin Random House)
