Book Awards: a brief and personal history

By Paula Morris

Tonight is the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, our annual celebration of local books, writers and publishers. I’ll be there at the Aotea Centre, although I’m no longer on the NZ Book Awards Trust, which organises this – along with the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and National Poetry Day, for which I was, for some years, a reluctant and inept spokesperson.

Although my family were avid readers, I grew up largely oblivious to our national book awards. In 1985, a month after my twentieth birthday, I left New Zealand to study at the University of York in England, and with one eighteen-month exception (Wellington for an MA with Bill Manhire and then Auckland waiting to go back to the US) I lived overseas for thirty years. The first book awards event I attended was in 2003, when my first novel, Queen of Beauty, won the Hubert Church Prize (for best first work of fiction): I flew in from the U.S. where, at 38, I was the oldest person in my class at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

It was a long night. Sixteen awards were given out, including three for best first books, a Readers’ Choice Award (poet Glenn Colquhoun), and awards for best review pages (the Listener) and best reviewer (David Eggleton, who wrote for the Listener). We were in Christchurch, and it was cold. The awards weren’t open to the public then: it was part of the Booksellers’ Association conference, and involved a conference-style fancy-ish dinner with big round tables. Steve Braunias, then editor of the Books pages of the Listener, was there; he kept going outside to smoke. He was one of the few people I knew there, sort of, because I wrote occasional reviews for him. None of my family or friends attended, because they lived in Auckland and would have needed to travel, as well as pay for the fancy-ish dinner.

Stephanie Johnson won the fiction prize for The Shag Incident and then she won an even bigger prize, the Deutz Medal for Fiction or Poetry. Glenn Colquhoun was the poet who missed out on this, but then, he did win the People’ Choice. The rest of the awards were for nonfiction: History; Biography; Environment; Lifestyle and Contemporary Culture; Illustrative; and Reference and Anthology. Six categories of nonfiction, plus an even bigger prize for one book, the ‘Montana Medal for Non-Fiction’. Michael Cooper’s The Wine Atlas of New Zealand won that, as well as the Lifestyle category.

I attended a few other awards ceremonies during the Montana years: definitely 2006, when I was home in Auckland for some reason, and possibly a contender for reviewer of the year. Because of wine, I don’t remember much of the event. Maurice Gee won the Deutz Medal for Blindsight and gave me his giant bottle prize rather than carry it on the plane. I used it later that night to knock against my sister’s front door, stage-whispering that I was too drunk to get the key to work. In 2008 the awards were in Wellington and I was there again to lose the reviewer-of-the-year award. By this time the ceremony was very long indeed, with seventeen awards (including the new Māori Language Award) – eight of which were for nonfiction. When New Zealand Post took over the sponsorship in 2010, the nonfiction categories were slashed to the three of the four we have now: General Non-Fiction, Illustrated Non-Fiction, and Best First Book (Non-Fiction).

At this point I was still overseas: this was the year I moved from a good job at a university in New Orleans to a terrible job at a university in Scotland (my worst job ever, including waitressing and working at record companies and doing piece work in my teens for my father, a printer). It’s possible that New Zealand Post didn’t want to spend so much money on so many prizes. When some people complain now – wanting larger amounts of prize money to match the endowed fiction prize, wanting more nonfiction categories to reflect current publishing trends, wanting to bring back some version of the Peoples’ Choice award to (in theory) recognise more ‘commercial’ titles – they rarely suggest ways of coming up with the cash.

The reset of 2010 still offered many more prizes than our original national book awards. In 1968 the Goodman Fielder Wattie Awards gave out three prizes only: first, second and third. All three that year were nonfiction: The New Zealand Sea Shore by John Morton and Michael Miller; Field Guide to the Alpine Plants of New Zealand by J. T. Salmon; and God in the New World by Lloyd Geering – suggesting that the word ‘new’ was essential to win a prize, and the words ‘New Zealand’ the most compelling. (In 2003 I saw three books with ‘New Zealand’ in their titles win nonfiction awards.)

Fiction and poetry got a foot in the door in 1971 with Margaret Orbell’s anthology Contemporary Māori Writing (second prize). C.K. Stead got third place the next year with Smith’s Dream, and 1973 was all fiction: Shadbolt, Frame, and Ihimaera, for his debut story collection Pounamu, Pounamu. Ihimaera won the following year for Tangi, the only fiction title to be awarded a prize, and the following year returned to all nonfiction.

Perhaps this is why, in 1976, the national awards split into two rival camps: the all-nonfiction GFWs and the more anarchic New Zealand Book Awards, which that first year gave out one nonfiction prize – to a book not in GFW’s top three – as well as two to poets (Stead, Louis Johnson) and two to fiction writers (Gee, O.E. Middleton). On the two awards ran for several years, without any titles in common. In 1978 the GFW gave third prize to a novel (O’Sullivan) but the NZBA fiction prize went to a novel by M.K. Joseph.

Occasionally the two awards agreed – in 1979 (Plumb by Maurice Gee); 1981 (The Lovelock Version by Maurice Shadbolt); 1982 (The South Island of New Zealand from the Road by Robin Morrison) and 1984 (An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame). Because, I suppose, of rules and submission deadlines, Sue McCauley’s Other Halves managed to win at the GFWs and the NZBA in different years (1981 and 1982), as did Janet Frame with The Envoy from Mirror City (1985 and 1986) and Patricia Grace with Potiki (1986 and 1987).

On the two awards rivers flowed, rarely crossing, even when Montana took over from GFW in 1994 and put an end to its gold, bronze and silver medals. Instead it had three categories: Fiction, Poetry and Nonfiction, just like the NZBA – except the latter had added Book Production in 1981, possibly to make sure books with ‘New Zealand’ in their titles continued winning something. (I counted them: there are ten.) Then, in 1996, the awards proliferated (see above), along with the giant bottles of wine.

In the NZ Post Years, some things continued: the fancy-ish dinners, the ‘big’ prize for a book which had won in another category, People’s Choice. In 2012 I spent hundreds of dollars on tickets to attend the event at Auckland Museum with four members of my family (two of them in rented tuxes): Rangatira won the fiction prize. My mother, who had cancer, was too sick to come. (‘Remember,’ she said to me that afternoon, ‘that even if you don’t win, we’ll all know you were really the best.’)

The NZ Post years ended too soon, and so abruptly that there were no awards in 2015. This is the year I moved back to New Zealand: my mother had died, and my father was in the last two years of his life. I needed to be home. I didn’t need to be on the NZ Book Awards Trust, but there I was, on the Book Awards Trust. By 2016 a generous new funder, Mark Todd of Ockham Residential, had stepped in to make national book awards possible again. In that first year of the ‘Ockhams era’, the event was open to the public rather than held at an exclusive ticketed dinner, and run in conjunction with the Auckland Writers Festival. That first year it was held in Auckland Town Hall, which some people complained made it feel like a school prizegiving. (I don’t know what kind of schools they went to. I went to Rutherford High School in Te Atatu.) It wasn’t black tie, though Chris Tse did wear black feathers. Since then the awards are usually held in the Aotea Centre, unless they are online (Covid) or in Q Theatre (post-Covid). Last year about 600 people attended, which means Q Theatre is too small and the Kiri te Kanawa Theatre in the Aotea Centre is too big. Most of these attendees are members of the public who buy tickets and I salute them. It’s easier to denigrate the relative smallness of our awards ceremony, especially if you have never attended a scholarly talk at a university or given a reading in a library, than to support and join in.

Because of my five years on the NZ Book Awards Trust, I know certain things about the ‘Ockhams era’. One is that the show worked best when it was ‘called’ by Jonathan Alver. Another is that Jonathan’s suggestion of a disco ball, enthusiastically supported by me, was transformational. It made such a difference to the lights show that one writer was heard grumbling, on the way out, that the awards had gone ‘too Hollywood’. Another thing I know: for four years, the flower arrangement on stage was harakeke, woven by Hazel Grace – my teacher at Te Wananga – because even after a year of study I am not that good a weaver. The flowers this year will be fresh because too much carting-around of the harakeke arrangement has made it lopsided.

I know how much depends on funders like Ockham Residential, and like the late Jann Medlicott, introduced via the Acorn Foundation, who gave enough money to fund a prize for her passion, fiction, in perpetuity. It’s been suggested that this money should be divided up among all the categories to be more ‘fair’ – but it can’t be. Jann donated it for the fiction prize only. Other donors have stepped up, like Mary and Peter Biggs, who fund the Poetry prize, and Booksellers Aotearoa, which funds the Illustrated Non-Fiction prize. Someone else is needed to step up for General Non-Fiction, currently without a donor. Our awards for best first books have long histories: the Hubert Church Memorial Prize, now for fiction, was established in 1945. The Jessie Mackay Prize, given to poetry, was set up in 1939. (In 1951, the year she turned 27, Janet Frame won the Hubert Church for The Lagoon and Other Stories.) These prizes did not shimmer into being in some golden age of literary support: PEN New Zealand, now the NZSA, raised the initial funds to launch a prize in Mackay’s name, and used a bequest from Church’s widow for his prize. They’re now supported by the Mātātuhi Foundation – an initiative driven by Anne O’Brien when she was director of the Auckland Writers Festival. I am a board member, and will be handing out the cheques to best-first-book winners at the Ockhams tonight.

For the last four of my five years on the New Zealand Book Awards Trust, my chief job was identifying and securing judges for each of the panels. I read, recently, that the Ockham judges are ‘volunteers’, a literary version of a Brown Owl or Akela, mucking in to help for the good of the community. This is not true. Each year we wanted a range of backgrounds and experience, so no panel of judges was all one thing – all writers, all scholars, all curators, all booksellers, say. We wanted geographic diversity, so no more than one judge in any given category was from Wellington or Auckland. I wanted at least one Māori judge in every category.

All of this was difficult to achieve, and usually took me two months of emailing, flattering, cajoling, fibbing and guilt-tripping. In my first year of recruiting judges, I tried the Brown Owl approach, i.e. ‘service to the literary community’, but this wasn’t particularly successful. Often someone I saw as an ideal judge was too busy – writing, working, travelling, living, dying – and some of them fobbed me off, year after year, promising that they would have more time in the future. Often prospective judges had too many conflicts of interest: they had served as editors, advisors, mentors, first readers or manuscript assessors. They had contributed to a book in contention. They were best friends with people who were publishing that year; they were ex-wives or ex-husbands going through bitter break-ups with authors in contention. Some walked away because of feuds, usually with other prospective judges.

The Trust suggested an open call for judges in addition to the usual method, but we were hardly bombarded, or even pelted, with candidates. I followed up with one person who self-nominated, sending them the judging timeline, but they had a change of heart because they decided that the judging fee – advertised in the open call – was not enough. I left the Book Awards Trust at the end of my five years of service and someone else took over the fibbing and cajoling, the trawling for names, the seeking of recommendations. Although I wasn’t happy to see two Wellington judges on the Gang of Three fiction panel this year, I understood: it is hard to find people willing and able to do the work. Even if I disagree with their decisions, which I often do, I know the judges have been serious and thoughtful in their approach to the process. I was a judge for an Australian award a few years ago, and know how many hours you spend reading, discussing, arguing, considering. (We were dealing with 180 books overall and an incredibly strong top 20.) Our national book awards are not a lottery. They are sometimes – usually – contentious, but they are not random.

They’re also both important and unimportant. Writers like winning prizes even if they don’t ‘need’ the money because book prizes are seen as recognition, for better or worse, of your talent and your creative practice. This means that every year one ego will be flattered and others will be flattened, just as they are by reviews and book sales and invitations and commissions. And if you win, someone will be there to tell you that you got the award simply because it was your turn, and that the whole thing is just a lottery.

For those of us who need the money, prizes are windfalls: we cry when we get them, we cry when we don’t get them. Winning prizes or getting grants can make a huge difference to our lives. I have wept over various letters, emails, phone calls. I have felt defeated and overlooked and depressed. Often my own creative work is sidelined so I can earn money to pay bills. I don’t own the place where I live and probably never will. There is no Utopian future in New Zealand for artists holding out for generous patronage from the state or private sector, because we’re not that kind of country. I don’t know where that kind of country exists. Certainly in the US, which has much vaster sums from non-government funders to dispense in prizes and grants, the majority of writers I knew had day jobs. Toni Morrison had a day job. She probably needed health insurance.

Writers who despise the whole circus of book awards should ask their publishers not to submit their books. It’s not mandatory to enter a book for an award, or to have social media accounts, or to appear at festivals. Some writers don’t want any part of it and they’ll accept the consequences, which may be lower sales and/or obscurity. All of us writers must write the thing we absolutely want to write, to the best of our ability, and accept the consequences. Some of us will sell more books than others. Some of us will win more awards. Some of us will take a long time to publish. Barbara Anderson turned 63 the year she published her first book, a story collection. She won a GFW award – first prize! – in 1992 for her third book, the novel Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, but she won nothing that year at the NZBA. One set of judges loved her; the other set did not.

In my past lives, I attended other awards ceremonies, including the Booker Prize twice and the Grammys three times. Most of the Grammy Awards aren’t televised because there are dozens and dozens and dozens of them. The first time I went, the awards were held in Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and we had to arrive at two in the afternoon. A few hundred of us sat wherever we wanted; some people milled around in the side aisles, waiting for their category to be called. Most people there were record company staff, like me, or artists – pop, rock, rap, classical, jazz, gospel, Latin, world music, reggae, polka. Hours later the televised ceremony would begin and I would have to sit much higher up in the auditorium and much further back, watching a distant Bruce Springsteen or Sheryl Crow perform, in a seat that cost my employer US$750. But in that smaller afternoon ceremony Sheryl Crow was one of the people hanging out in the aisle, waiting – hoping – to hear her name called.

Back then I hadn’t written anything in years; I was five years away from getting a short story published, seven years away from publishing a novel. I had no idea that some day I’d be one of the nervous, excited, dread-ravaged people at an awards ceremony, trying to look nonchalant. I had no idea that awards would come to mean something personal rather than purely professional, that I would exchange a well-paid, stupid life for something poorly paid but vital to my happiness. Sometimes, in my darker moments, I wish I had stayed in a job that kept me in the shadows of the auditorium rather than stepping into a disco-ball spotlight, where my need and disappointment and illusions are all too visible. But a writer’s life and work are all about trying and failing, venturing forth, retrenching. Sometimes book awards recognise what we’ve achieved and sometimes they overlook us. They say what all awards for art forms say: that making art is important and skilled artists should be celebrated. In New Zealand it’s the rare time we’ll see TV cameras at a book-related event, waiting to interview writers. The disco ball will spin and we’ll be seen and, however briefly, heard.