Pip Adam’s writing has been described as ‘a kind of post-post modern fiction – nothing meta, no irony, no narrative arc, no insights or character transformations – the stories are flatline and searing and real’ (Helen Lehndorf, Palmerston North Library).  Her diverse work has appeared in Sport, Glottis, Turbine, Landfall, Lumière Reader, Hue & Cry, Metro and Overland. She has been runner up for the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition (2007), received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award (2012), and her first collection of short stories, Everything We Hoped For, won the NZ Post Best First Book Award (2011). Pip’s novel The New Animals (Victoria UP) won the $52,000 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and Nothing to See (Victoria University Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2024 her latest work, Audition, was also shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize.

In 2007, Pip gained an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Victoria University, followed by a PhD in 2012 which explores how engineers describe the built environment. She was appointed the Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2021.

Pip is a book reviewer on RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan show and she also produces Better off Read a podcast outside of the mainstream where she talks with diverse writers and other artists about reading. Several of Pip’s pieces, responding to visual art, have been published in conjunction with exhibitions. In addition, her words were used by photographer Ann Shelton in her installation House Work. She currently facilitates writing workshops in several universities and Arohata Women’s Prison where she works with the Right Here, Right Now collective.

Part science fiction, part social realism, Pip’s latest work Audition (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023) is a genre-bending novel that asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – and about how we live with each other’s violences – and imagines a new kind of justice.

In 2025 Pip was awarded the biennial Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship. Her project for the Fellowship is to write three works for performance, starting with an adaptation of her latest novel, Audition. This is new territory for Pip, whose works to date have been produced as books for readers.

 

Links

Twitter:@PipAdam

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Arts Foundation Website

Better off Read podcast

CNZ Micheal King Writer’s Fellowship announcement (June, 2025)

Reading Room article on Pip’s writing, works and themes (July, 2023)

ANZL feature on writing Audition and questioning reality (July, 2023)

Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books: Audition reviewed by Angelique Kasmara (July, 2023)

The Big Idea interview on being a writer, writers’ block and how to fix it (July, 2020)

Stuff article discussing how Pip writes (Oct, 2020)

Stuff article discussing Pip’s 2018 Ockham win (May, 2018)

Ockhams NZ Book Awards Announcement (May, 2018)

Somewhere we can live by Simon Gennard in Pantograph Punch (2016)

Utopias Old and New by Dougal McNeill in Counterfutures Issue 1 (2016)