Ockham NZ Book Awards: Fiction Round Table 2024

This year’s finalists for the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction are novelists Pip Adam (Audition), Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood), Stephen Daisley (A Better Place) and Emily Perkins (Lioness). Juliet Blyth, convenor of judges for the fiction panel, calls these books ‘four singular and accomplished’ novels that ‘encompass pertinent themes of social justice, violence, activism, capitalism, war, identity, [and] class.’

Audition, ‘a blend of space opera and social realism, is a fine example of Pip Adam’s ingenuity and imagination,’ Angelique Kasmara wrote in the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books, adding that ‘Adam’s world-building is its own precisely constructed and glorious reimagining of our universe.’

Dwight Garner in The New York Times describes Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood as ‘a big book, a sophisticated page-turner, that does something improbable: It filters anarchist, monkey-wrenching environmental politics, a generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur and a downhill-racing plot through a Stoppardian sense of humour.’

In A Better Place, set during World War II and its aftermath, Stephen Daisley ‘writes fiction with the economy and clarity of a poet and with deep empathy for the impact of violence,’ contends The Age. The novel ‘contrasts brisk and often confronting accounts of military action and experience during wartime with elegy for a personal aftermath ghosted by trauma and loss.’

Lioness by Emily Perkins explores ‘femininity, wealth, inequality, pretence, seduction and family,’ writes Josie Shapiro in Kete. Perkins’ fifth novel about a family with a ‘Succession-like sensibility’ is a work of ‘powerful insight which lures readers into a beguiling tale of a woman unravelling.’

This conversation took place in April and early May 2024, with Paula Morris contributing occasional questions. Sadly, Stephen Daisley was not able to join us, but we all look forward to celebrating his work at the Ockham NZ Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday 15 May.

 

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Paula: Welcome to our 2024 round table. All four nominees are past winners at various iterations of your national book awards — Emily in 2009 for Novel About My Wife; Ellie in 2014 for The Luminaries; Stephen in 2016 for Coming Rain; and Pip in 2018 for The New Animals. In what ways has your fiction changed and developed in recent years?

Pip: I think there are elements of Audition that the writer I was in 2018 would think were an incredible step backwards. I value things today that then I would have thought were ‘bad writing’. I think Audition is louder about its politics than The New Animals was. I used to worship ambiguity and now, as things become more desperate politically, I think I say a lot more things straight when in the past I might have hinted at them.

I often say that with The New Animals all I really wanted to do was write that last third, but I felt like I needed to earn it with a more conventional ‘plot’ in the first two thirds — this book is a loosening of that constraint. I often think Audition was written largely ‘out of sight’. I felt like I was writing a book that would never be published and I think this gave me certain freedoms to challenge things I thought about writing. It’s also a reflection of a change in ‘taste’. I feel like my taste had largely been formed by other people and it’s another thing I started challenging – this idea of what I’d been taught was ‘good writing’. I found this whole new world of writing that made me feel uncomfortable, off-kilter, horny, frightened and it made me realise there’s a narrative that’s written in and for the body. Audition represents the completion of my turn to a conversation with the messy, weird, often embarrassing vessels we live in.

Ellie: I found publishing a third novel to be unexpectedly self-revealing. I had always thought of The Rehearsal and The Luminaries as quite different books, but looking at them next to Birnam Wood, their differences suddenly seemed only like variations on a pattern that previously I hadn’t been able to see. I was quite surprised to realise that all three of my books share an interest in fictions, particularly in fictions of identity, and that all three involve narratives that are deliberately limited or incomplete.

I have always been fascinated by the problem of how to reconcile form and plot — I love them both! I want them both! — and although each book tackles that problem in a different way, Birnam Wood is unique in that I had a clear formal model in mind: Jane Austen’s Emma, which I’d adapted for film around the time that my first ideas for Birnam Wood were taking root. I had come to understand Jane Austen as the heir to Shakespearean comedy, and I wanted to see if I could imitate her perceptive, funny, deeply empathetic kind of satire, but in the service of a tragic, rather than a comedic, form.

I was also feeling increasingly concerned about the denaturing effects of social media, and I wanted to write a book that behaved anti-algorithmically: rather than flattering the reader, confirming them in the habits and beliefs they hold already, I wanted to deliver on the old-fashioned, emphatically temporal pleasures of tension, seduction, and surprise — to be entertaining, first and foremost, but also, to be a work of moral ambivalence and irony. My ambitions for my first two books were more specific to the books themselves. I just wanted to finish them, and I wanted them to work.

Emily: I feel like my fiction develops as I live more life — what I understand and appreciate about human experience keeps expanding, and hopefully this leads to more nuance, flexibility and depth in the work.

The technical game with Novel About My Wife was aligning the unreliable narrator with the unfolding plot. For Lioness this was a more subtle task. The tightrope I was walking felt a lot more delicate. It was important for me to remain in good faith with the characters — one of the things the book is about is complicity — and I wanted to keep turning over actions and implications, to feel like ‘we’re all in this together’ even as I was writing about a world in which many don’t share that view. So as the story unfolds and Therese’s voice begins to change, we’re inside her and outside her at the same time. I hope this allows for a kind of doubled or tripled readerly experience of the novel.

And Lioness probably also draws on the importance of bodily experience that I was exploring in The Forrests, and binds that more tightly to the story. Not that it’s any kind of fusion of my previous books — it’s very much its own thing — but when you start a novel, even if you feel stark naked you’re probably carrying tools you’ve developed before.

Paula: Pip talks about Audition as  ‘louder about its politics’. In what social and political worlds do your novels exist?

Pip: One of the things I find most compelling about science fiction and fantasy as a genre is their political potential. This is why I love your idea of ‘social and political worlds’. I wrote a story about a person in prison which was published in Everything We Hoped For. It was a realist story based on some of my own experience. In my head the protagonist was Pākeha, but I didn’t say that because I was still quite ignorant about my own whiteness and racism as a whole. Everything We Hoped For was adapted for radio, and this was the only story in the book that was read by a Māori actor. As you can imagine this made me think hard about the responsibilities I have as a writer. It made me realise that if I left an information gap in a ‘real’ setting it would be filled by the dominant narrative. In Aotearoa this means a colonial, white narrative. There are power structures and narratives I find very hard to escape when I write in a realistic way about this country or this planet. Don’t get me wrong, I think it can be done, very successfully, just not by me.

Also, I totally realise that setting something in another world doesn’t free you completely from dominant bigotry. But this is why my work has departed further and further from realism. The social political world of Audition is one I imagine evolved from a pre-Cambrian ancestor — the last iteration of life on this planet with no predation. I was keen to write a world with a different physics, ecology and biology because I believed this would make possible ways of thinking about crime and justice that aren’t available to us here. I thought a lot about Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany’s work, particularly one quote which speaks to the dominant idea that fiction must have conflict. LeGuin said, ‘Conflict is one kind of behaviour. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.’

Ellie: I love this quote! And I loved the way in which Audition challenged my sense of what is imaginable and unimaginable, not only in terms of literary conventions, but also socially and politically. It’s interesting that when we say something is ‘unspeakable’, we’re usually talking about something shameful or horrific, and when we use the word ‘indescribable’, we’re usually talking about something beautiful or pleasurable; as I was reading Audition, it occurred to me that perhaps what we think of as ‘unimaginable’ depends on the degree to which we believe that people, or societies, are capable of change. After all, the first part of changing is believing that change is even possible: it’s an imaginative act before it’s a social or political one. Conflict, to follow Ursula Le Guin’s point, arises when we refuse to change, or believe ourselves to be incapable of it.

The role that fiction plays in all of that is complicated. Change is an inevitable fact of life, since none of us can stop time, reverse it, or slow it down; in a novel, though, time is eminently pliable, and all change, or lack of it, is engineered. As a novelist, you create cause and effect. You control mortality, dreams, coincidence, the weather, the population, along with every other aspect of the novel’s political and social reality; everything is imagined, and everything is imaginable. And yet you’ve also got a responsibility to speak to the real world, to address and entertain and satisfy a living, present-day reader, without whom your fiction can’t really be said to exist. Sometimes it makes sense to depict real-world injustice, because to deny it would be irresponsible, and sometimes it makes sense to refuse to depict injustice, because to do so would make the work complicit in that injustice, which would be irresponsible. Both stances can be legitimate and both can be contested; that’s the beauty and the puzzle of art.

With Birnam Wood, I had political reasons for having made certain artistic choices. Neither of the younger women in the book, Shelley or Mira, is described physically, to use one example; another is that the book begins with a natural disaster that turns out in fact to have been man-made. I believe that every artist should have good reasons for the choices that they make, should know the histories and legacies that go along with those choices, and should trust in the maturity and intelligence of the reader. But I also believe the social and political dimension of a novel depends far more on what it does than on what it depicts, and what it does, or doesn’t do, is something only the reader can judge. So my hopeful answer to ‘what social and political worlds does Birnam Wood inhabit?’ would be— ‘as many as possible, for as long as possible’.

Emily: These are such interesting answers! What you say about believing change is even possible, Ellie, was one of the things underpinning Lioness for me. I wanted to write about this social and political world that’s very recognisable, that has its rules and blind spots, and to hint at the way personal change might be a prerequisite, or a starting point, for social or political change. The story is also propelled by some of the reasons change doesn’t happen — in this case, internal obstacles to do with old hurts, comforts and rewards, deep urges running the show. Also maybe loneliness. I think a lot of writing is in some core way about loneliness. I like what first person narration combined with the presence of other voices can do to suggest the presence of a world beyond the characters.

I’m interested in the political playing out through humour. The world Lioness inhabits felt like it required the lightest possible touch — to play with how small a gesture can be, in fiction, to carry a political charge. (Sometimes very small indeed, I think.) It was a way of paying attention to how freighted and consequential our passing behaviours are, and to wonder, if she changes the way she responds to this, does it follow that she can change something more? I really like this thing a dramaturg told me: that a play can end on a character having a new thought. I’d add that it’s the task of the play or novel to get them to the point of being capable of that new thought — a thought they couldn’t have had at the start of the book. I wanted to allow for that possibility, even though the story is also exploring how change can be slow and hard and imperfect, and always incomplete.

(And just to that incompleteness: I became aware at some point in the drafting process that the novel had its influences in the 20^th century novels about women’s awakenings that I’d discovered as an adolescent in my mother’s bookshelves. The fact that similar problems were still around — and that my 22-year-old daughter could read a draft of Lioness and say, ‘this is some of the stuff my friends and I talk about’ — became part of the writing of it, too.)

Ellie: What you say about humour makes me think of a conversation I had recently with a woman, an actress, who was telling me about her experience living in a part of Berlin where none of her neighbours shared her political views. I asked her how she had managed to forge connections despite this lack of common ground, and she said, ‘Well, making fun of yourself helps.’ I was so impressed by that answer.

One of the details I loved in Lioness was how Heathcote put on a fake Irish accent whenever he was under pressure. I found it very funny and well-observed, but also positively enraging, to a degree that I started wondering, ‘Oh God, do I do a version of that, and that’s why I am finding this person so maddening? I hope I don’t. I’m pretty sure I don’t. But do I?’ Which maybe speaks to the doubled/tripled experience that you were talking about earlier — the sense in which that ‘new thought’ is occurring not just to the character but also, and sometimes just as changefully, to the reader.

Emily: I like that actress’s approach. Also the goal of forging connections despite political differences. And — I’m off topic now — but I completely get the thing of wondering, does that thing irritate me so much because I do it myself. To move this from self-awareness to an awareness of how you might be perceived by others (I guess there’s a Venn diagram here?) — I was talking to some writing students the other day and one of them was trying to figure out, to understand as if from the outside, what her voice was. How did she, as a writer, come across? Her next question was, should she be more this way or that way. The only thing I could suggest that I hoped might be useful was that she forget about trying. But I’d love to know whether you two would have different, better advice for her. Or whether you remember ever having a similar dilemma. (To be clear I think she was talking about how the person behind the work would be perceived, not the effect her work was having in its own right.)

Pip: I think the advice is good — forgetting about things that I’m labouring over is the only way for me to let some space in. I think I am often trying to manufacture some kind of self-forgetting or a way of getting out of myself (I think of this quite literally — sometimes I want to write with no brain and no personality — just a body). That being said, I might be tempted to use this forgetting as space so I can write and therefore get more information to bring back to the concern. So yeah, my process might be — worry, forget, write, worry more intentionally.

I think self-consciousness, shame, worrying about what others will think is one the most useful tools I have in my practice. I think this goes back to some fundamental misunderstandings I have as a reader around the relationship between the author and the narrative voice. That is, I feel like an author’s voice never fully disappears from a work or is never fully transformed completely from their real-world personhood — I have a bit of a failure of imagination in this regard. Often I experience books as the author telling me a story. I always have to think about things like ‘voice’ in a really systematic way — like these are the elements of voice, which dial is wound up and which is wound down. I do the same in real life interactions — what dials does the person I am speaking with have wound up, what is the correct position of my dials to respond appropriately? And this transfers to my writing.

I used to say I didn’t write with an audience in mind but I realise now that isn’t actually true. I’m often testing every word choice, tone, sentence in the same way I do in real-life conversations and I wonder if the aim is the same — to be seen as a decent person. I never feel like I disappear as the author, the book is an extension of me — the me that is typing this — rather than a product of me. I feel like every book is a plea, a demand, so yeah, I’m always thinking about how to make that appeal in a way that doesn’t see me expelled from the communities I cherish and am often trying to be in conversation with in my writing or in ways that make other members of the communities feel excluded.

I really think I have a responsibility in writing. I think writing fiction has real-world consequences, and I think worrying about how I come across, what judgements a reader might make about me through the work, is a safeguard against me doing harm. Although I do talk to other writers about this as a part of practice, I think it applies to me particularly because I often, now and in the past, do things and say things that do harm (often because I get my dials wrong). I know these ideas aren’t revolutionary, and I like the way we have moved away in the last ten or so years from the idea that fiction has no moral duty except to itself. I know also that this is not everyone’s experience or aim. I’m so interested in authorial voice in Birnam Wood and Lioness. Is the divide between narrative voice and your voice (and maybe personality?) something you think about?

I think about this particularly when it comes to humour (if I can circle back to that). Both of you have great senses of humour in yourselves. It’s something I love about talking to you both and it’s one of the things I really like in Lioness and Birnam Wood. I value sense of humour incredibly highly. If I was doing that morals ranking exercise during intimacy week on Married at First Sight it would probably be at the top (an aside — this is probably why I hate Jack and Jono and love Lauren). I feel that sense of humour is so personal, and I wonder if it’s possible to write in a voice that has a different sense of humour to ours? I’m really interested in this with regard to what you were saying about the political potential of humour, Emily. There is this amazing book I read a few years back called That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them and it made me think if it would be possible for me to write a gag I didn’t find funny —  do I have the skills to do it and could I live with people thinking that was my sense of humour.

Ellie: I know what you mean about the author never really disappearing, but personally I don’t care that much about the author’s personality except insofar as it impacts their choices in the work. If I found out that a writer was racist or misogynistic I would probably give their books a miss, but I have read and loved plenty of books written by people whose values I don’t share. The way that a character’s voice can be heard alongside the authorial voice is also interesting to me; I guess I would say I’m more interested in the way those two voices interact than in the slippage between the narrative voice and the natural speaking voice of the writer.

I’m thinking of a novel like Mrs Bridge, one of my favourite books, in which the narrative invites you to take a perspective on Mrs Bridge while at the same time inhabiting her consciousness completely. (And then the sequel, Mr Bridge, makes that multiplicity even more acute.) If I had to describe what I think and feel about the author, Evan S. Connell, it would be pretty simple: gratitude for having written two great books, admiration for his skill, curiosity about how he pulled it off. I don’t have a sense of him as a person, really; only as a craftsman. I am sure he had anxieties about how he would be perceived through his work, as we all do, but I appreciate the fact that I don’t know what those anxieties were. His books wouldn’t have worked for me, I don’t think, if he had made his own self-consciousness my problem.

When I read narrative non-fiction, though, or novels where the author is a character in some way, I often feel the opposite: I want those books to explore the author’s anxieties and fears, and a lack of self-awareness in those contexts sometimes feels like a cop-out. So I don’t really have an answer for your student, Emily, except to say that my strategy has always been to prioritise the reader’s experience of reading my books above my experience of writing them. The trouble with worrying about how you’re going to be perceived is that the reader is never going to share that anxiety with you to the same extent or in the same way. So you risk losing sight of where they’re at: you’re looking in the mirror when you should have been noticing what they wanted, what they needed, what they expected, what they feared.

There’s also the interesting case of characters who have things in common with the author. I’m always conscious of the fact that characters who are of a similar age, gender and ethnicity as me are going to be automatically identified with me by many readers, and that can feel uncomfortable at times. In one of Mira’s sections in Birnam Wood, she is described as secretly preferring the company of men. This was true to my understanding of her psychology, and I was happy with the passage when I wrote it, but for months, every time I re-read it, I had the same worry: that people would assume this trait was also true of me. (It isn’t, but that’s sort of beside the point — I was afraid that people might think it was.) I actually came quite close to taking the passage out, but then told myself very sternly that I was being a coward, which (ironically? or self-fulfillingly?) is of course exactly what Mira would have done.

Emily: Ha, perhaps there’s no escape. It’s funny that this is the stuff that gives us pause, that we worry people might think we’re telling on ourselves, when as a reader it’s exactly what makes me feel in closer sympathy with characters: their secret flaws. I really like that Birnam Wood tells us this about Mira, and I suppose as I read I register, oh cool, Ellie knows that this is a thing in the world, rather than presuming it’s your preference for male company. I guess there’s a clear, if often subjective, distinction between writing that’s intentional and illuminating, and writing that’s unintentionally self-revealing or gives us that queasy feeling of ‘reading against the book’.

Back to your example, Ellie, I like too the implication that Mira knows this thing about herself and suppresses this knowledge. It reminds me of the incredible scene with Shelley at the safe house after [no spoilers]. I loved her flickering dread — this kind of fluctuating awareness that makes a character feel thrillingly alive to me. Like some of Torren’s most ashamed or unresolved feelings in Audition, Pip, which really pierced me. Her dilemma is awful, and her feelings come from inside it. These are the things that stay with me after a story is over. And just to say my experience of you both is as incredibly moral writers and people!

Somehow related — I’ve just finished watching Steven Zaillian’s Ripley adaptation on Netflix, which I loved, and I really enjoyed what you’ve written about this for The Spinoff, Pip, because I also became obsessed with the degree to which it was about work. And I felt closest to Ripley when he was having to get rid of a body. Objectively it’s a terrible thing to do — but the fact of the task, and his responsibility for it, leapt across the actual content of what he was doing and into my fellow experience of what it’s like to have to clean up an awful mess, even one of your own making. (Also because these are scenes of utmost concentration, and that’s always compelling.)

I’m not saying that creating closeness — or relatability, or empathy —is the sole goal of fiction. But these moments of sympathy, when it feels like you’re being permeated by the book, are a huge part of what I read for. They do the work of carrying everything else. And back to the business of being perceived, generally I feel like I write from a place of such imperfection I could never clean it all up, which probably makes me feel both closer to Tom Ripley and further away.

Pip, to your question, is the divide between narrative voice and your voice (and maybe personality?) something you think about? I think narrative voice comes out of the set of fictional conditions, and that these include more constraints in fiction than in blobby, amorphous life. But it also drives the conditions and it’s impossible for me to separate those actions of generating and responding. I do love first person for this reason — the characterisation of voice — it becomes like another body I can climb into to tell the story (to continue this unfortunate serial killer analogy I seem to be drawn to). I hardly ever read my old work, but if I do, it can be the voice that surprises me. Who’s that? Where do they come from? And there are certain places in the fiction where it’s closer to me as I live off the page. The bad jokes especially.

Ellie: Oh man! The self-knowledge we suppress, the way we feel about our feelings, the way we think about our thoughts — this is my absolute favourite territory in fiction. And in life, for that matter. I haven’t seen the Ripley adaptation yet, but I know the thrilling intimacy you describe: by focusing on a task that simply must be carried out, a story can feel as though it’s trying to suppress its own subconscious, as we all sometimes fixate on tasks or rote procedures when we are trying to avoid confronting something emotionally difficult.

For ages I had David Mamet’s three dramatic questions pinned above my desk: Who wants what? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now? Ripley disposing of a body meets these criteria perfectly. What does he want? To get rid of a body! What happens if he doesn’t get it? He gets caught! Why now? Because the guy’s already dead, already decomposing, and people are going to start looking for him soon, and Ripley’s already on the run! All the other questions — why did he do it? How does he feel about having done it? How does he justify it to himself? — are driven underground and in a sense enriched. Tackling my own body-disposal problem in Birnam Wood, I found Val McDermid’s book Forensics fascinating and very useful. But now we sound a bit like serial killers comparing notes…

Paula: This morning I heard the awful news of Vincent O’Sullivan’s death. He’s a writer so many of us admire, and he was also a mentor and teacher of great perception and wisdom. (He was my mentor-in-chief for the ANZL.) In his ANZL interview with Majella Cullinane he talked about the notion of influence, saying: ‘I think the authors we most admire may not be the ones that most obviously influence us, because they may be the ones we take the most care not to sound like.’

There are some writers who are important in our writing lives even if they’re not a direct stylistic influence. I love reading Salman Rushdie’s work, for example, and Midnight’s Children changed the way I perceived and imagined the world around me, but I don’t know that I would seek to emulate his writing style. Who are the writers with whom you engage imaginatively and/or intellectually, but not necessarily stylistically?

Pip: It was extremely sad to lose Vincent O’Sullivan this week. As I was reflecting on his work, I realised the work of his that I’m most familiar with and that feels resonant in my life is his poetry and music. And I think in a way this responds to your question perhaps indirectly. I started as a poet. It was all I wanted to be — possibly I still would like to be a poet. But as someone said, ‘You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you’re able to make sing’, and I am probably not a poet. I still write poetry, but it’s something I do for myself and not for anyone to read. So it’s poetry which immediately came to mind when you talked about work that engages me but I will never be able to emulate. I probably read more pages of poetry each year than pages of fiction.

I’m sure this work settles in me, and I’m sure some of its mood or rhythm ends up in my work but, yeah, I love reading for ‘no stated purpose’ except pleasure, if you know what I mean. I’m re-reading Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright at the moment, and I think maybe this is my Rushdie. I love the way the language in Wright’s book means I have to read it slowly. Line-by-line, not thinking about the other 700 pages. I also like that, because I’m not Waanyi, there are parts of this book I’ll never fully understand — they’re not for me, and I find it really tames my entitlement to every book written in English.

I think, as a Pākeha, it’s really important for me to read things where I’m the outsider. Not to learn or take but to de-centre the Pākeha parts of me. On a stylistic level, Praiseworthy is a book I could never write. Anytime I try to write like this it unravels. I think my mind is not made this way. But I love what this book does to my mind, so if my mind is being changed it must be affecting how I write. Wright’s work lengthens the playing field of what a novel can do — which is probably the greatest gift a novelist can give another novelist.

I guess I also am always thinking and reading Geoff Cochrane. I could never write like Geoff — although I think I am always writing about some of the same things that are in Geoff’s work — alcoholism, God, the body — and he is still a massive influence on me; he is just way more well-read and has a deeper understanding of literature and philosophy than I ever will. Geoff died in 2022 and last year his Selected Poems came out so, I think, this is going to be the first year without a Geoff Cochrane book since I started reading him and I feel that gap. I didn’t know Geoff well, but this loss is really acute for me. I have a photo of Geoff above my desk. He always helps me keep the faith. I think he might have hated that.

Emily: It’s hard to properly take in the fact that Vincent O’Sullivan is gone — and, as you say of Geoff Cochrane, Pip – hard to believe there won’t be any more work. It’s a major loss, and Paula, I’m so sorry you’ve lost him as a mentor.

I’m kind of thrilled though to hear that you started as a poet, Pip. I did not know this! It makes a lot of sense to me — the Beckettian aspects of your work have been noted, especially in Audition, and your use of language and rhythm is a huge part of what I go to your writing for. Can we have a book of your poems?

Otherwise, I find this a daunting question because I will say some names, then definitely remember five writers tomorrow who I’d want to talk about instead. The earliest ‘adult’ novels I remember reading were by Kurt Vonnegut and Iris Murdoch, and they each had a big effect on my imagination and thinking, and perhaps the utterly weird combination of those two authors almost has a third effect. I would never attempt to emulate Vonnegut, and I don’t return to his writing; I just know he was part of my waking up to the world. I don’t think the writers I do keep returning to belong to this answer, even poets and playwrights whose style is incredibly different from mine — I seek them out because I want their secret influence.

Ellie: I thought of Alexis Wright as well, for her incredible novel The Swan Book, and also Chigozie Obioma, whose debut The Fishermen I adored. I so admired the way those two books were powered and ensouled, without ever feeling as if their use of Aboriginal and Igbo philosophy was something that I could (or should) imitate. The interesting thing about influence, though, is how unpredictable and often subconscious it is. For me, negative influences are often just as powerful as positive ones. When a book bores me, I just stop reading. But when a book makes me feel angry or betrayed, I always get excited. What can I learn from what the author is failing or neglecting to do?

Emily, I once heard someone say that Iris Murdoch was rubbish at character names and that’s why her books are weirdly hard to remember — because however brilliant they are as novels, the people in them sort of fade away; their names just aren’t memorable enough. That isn’t really relevant to this question, I just thought it was interesting. (And true — I have read quite a few Iris Murdoch novels and can’t name a single character out of any of them.)

I would also like to pay tribute to Vincent O’Sullivan. Rest in peace.

Paula: One final question for this interesting conversation: once I attended some event in Scotland where the speaker said that all poets really want to become screenwriters and all screenwriters really want to become novelists. Novelists, he said, want to become poets. I don’t think any of that is true, and I’ve probably misrepresented it and forgotten what he really said, because it annoyed me so much at the time. Now we know that Pip no longer harbours ambitions in poetry, let me ask you all this: if you had the opportunity – and the talent — to do something wildly different from writing, what would it be?

Pip: The most impressive and important work of art I experienced last year was i.e. crazy’s album Country Justice. To call i.e. crazy a musician seems to only describe part of what they do. This album is a deeply researched argument and challenge presented in created and curated sounds that by-pass the ways we think on the day-to-day, and hits physically, emotionally and intelligently. I will never have the talent to do this, but I think sound is an incredibly powerful art.

Emily: Oh, agree. I’d love to be a singer. I mean, if I could sing. Or a visual artist — so many artists are an inspiration to me —- for Lioness I had Paula Rego images all over my writing room walls. Or I’d love to be a dancer — and this recent interview with the architect Tatiana Bilbao made me think about what a powerful profession that is. Are these things wildly different enough from writing to count? — not sure. When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut.  And Ellie, that could be true about Iris Murdoch and names — her books certainly are hard to distinguish from each other in memory —  though Charles Arrowby is a perfect name for that character… and I seem to remember a character in another book called Rain?? [TM note: Rain is a character in Murdoch’s book The Sandcastle]. Also — the appalling and unforgettable name of a location in The Sea, The Sea — I think it’s a country cottage — Niblets. Yuck! But brilliant.

Ellie: I stand corrected! This is a very respectable Murdoch memory haul!

I’d like to be a joiner and to have my own furniture workshop. I’d also love to be able to sew.

 

 

 

The Ockham NZ Book Awards take place on Wednesday 15 May in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland. The event starts at 7 PM. You can buy tickets here.

Read tributes to the late Jann Medlicott, generous donor of this fiction prize, here.