Wednesday, June 6, 2012

The NZ Post Book Awards shortlist

The shortlist for the 2012 NZ Post Book Awards has been announced today. The full press release from Booksellers NZ is here; the finalists in each category are below:    

Fiction
From Under the Overcoat by Sue Orr (Vintage)
Rangatira by Paula Morris (Penguin)
The Trouble with Fire by Fiona Kidman (Vintage)

Poetry
The Leaf-ride by Dinah Hawken (VUP)
Shift by Rhian Gallagher (AUP)
Thicket by Anna Jackson (AUP)

Illustrated Non-Fiction
A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy by Gregory O’Brien (AUP)
New Zealand Film:  An Illustrated History by Diane Pivac, Frank Stark and Lawrence McDonald (Te Papa Press)
 New Zealand’s Native Trees by  John Dawson and Rob Lucas (Craig Potton)
Playing with Fire: Auckland Studio Potters Society Turns 50 by Peter Lange and Stuart Newby (Auckland Studio Potters Society/CNZARD)
Whatu Kakahu / Maori Cloaksby Awhina Tamarapa (Te Papa Press)

General Non-Fiction
Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas by Anne Salmond (Penguin)
The Broken Book by Fiona Farrell (AUP)
The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso by Peter Wells (Vintage)
So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder That Shocked the World by Peter Graham (Awa Press)
Tupaia: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator by Joan Druett (Random House)

What’s always at least as interesting as what’s on the shortlist is what isn’t.  The winners will be announced on Wednesday 1 August.

2 comments:

  1. What isn't on the shortlist? I do wish somebody would publish the whole list of books that were entered. Now that a year passes so very quickly...

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  2. Guy Somerset has listed some on his Listener page. Big names missing from poetry are Vincent O'Sullivan, Peter Bland and Jenny Bornholdt; and in fiction Owen Marshall's Larnchs and Squigley's Conductor, both of which were bestsellers.

    The full list of what was entered is never published, probably because publishers don't automaticallly enter every book (it costs money) and if authors found out they had not been entered they would automatically get cross.

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