Wilkins flies in late to win Ockhams
High drama on Wednesday night at the Ockham national book awards as Damien Wilkins only just made it from Wellington to Auckland in time to be presented with $65,000 as the winner of the fiction prize.
Delayed flights meant the Wellington writer had to literally run onto the stage at the Aotea Centre for the final announcement of the night at the Ockham awards held in the Aotea Centre. His novel Delirious won the fiction prize and $65,000.
In any case, righteousness and natural justice prevailed at the 2025 Ockham national book awards with the two best books published last year winning major awards: huzzah to Wilkins, and to Rotorua activist Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, who won the $12,000 nonfiction prize for her astounding memoir Hine Toa. Both books are destined to re-enter the bestseller charts like two blazing comets.
Other winners included Emma Neale, who won the $12,000 poetry prize for Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, and Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, authors of the winner of the $12,000 illustrated nonfiction prize, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art. Prize money of $3000 was also awarded to the winners of best first book. The full list appears at the end of this article.
The main spotlight belonged to Wilkins and his $65,000 windfall. It has been a long time between drinks: he won the fiction prize way back in 1994 for his debut novel The Miserables (recent inane review on GoodReads, by someone called Annie: 'Found it rather inaccessible, meandering, plotless and dry. Who gives out these literary awards anyway?') although he also won the prize for best YA novel for Aspiring at the 2020 children's book awards. Delirious may be his masterpiece, the book he was meant to write. It tells the story of a nice old couple who sell up their home and move to the arid lands of a retirement village. Pip Adam's review in ReadingRoom got it perfectly: 'At its heart it's a deeply affecting novel about the almost unbearable pains of being alive that are usually impossible for us to look at directly … It's an incredibly accomplished novel which demonstrates a deep and lived understanding of the ways we carry on while knowing what is coming for us at increasing speed the longer we live. In many ways this book destroyed me. It brought me to tears more than once, but it's a gift.'
Note the highly emotional response. It's also there in the recent review in Landfall, by Breton Dukes, who wrote, 'Like Damien, maybe you have had a sister die, or a mum go nutty … In Delirious, Wilkins disappears entirely and that's what makes it a great book; it's what makes a masterpiece—the absence of author, combined with riveting content, faultless craft and heart, heart, heart.'
If you have not read it already then you ought, ought, ought. Same goes for Hine Toa by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku. It's such a powerful book. (Congratulations, also, are due to HarperCollins, a commercial publisher which rarely features in the rarefied air of book awards; the commercially unpressured university presses picked up six of the eight Ockham awards on Wednesday. The other exception was Saufo'i Press, which published the winner of the best first book of poetry, Manuali'I by Rex Letoa Paget.) I expected Ngāhuia would write fascinating chapters on her involvement with emergent Māori rights group Ngā Tamatoa at Auckland University in the 1970s, and she did not disappoint. But she was just as compelling in her personal stories growing up in Rotorua and, later, realising she was lesbian. It's a sexy book. Hine Toa marks her second win at the national book awards, after winning the culture prize in 2008 as co-author of Mau Moko: The World of Māori Tattoo.
No surprises that Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis' Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous history of Māori art won the illustrated nonfiction prize. As Eva Corlett wrote in The Guardian, 'A landmark book celebrating Māori art has clocked up a couple of impressive firsts: not only is it the most comprehensive account of creative work by Indigenous New Zealanders ever published, it is also the first wide-ranging art history written entirely by Māori scholars.' It has since been published internationally, by the University of Chicago Press in the US and Australia. As for Emma Neale's prize-winning Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, it follows the possibly equal honour of being named by poetry czar Nick Ascroft in ReadingRoom as one of the best collections of 2024. 'A lot always happens in an Emma Neale poem,' wrote the czar. 'You are not left meandering imponderables. Each is told with her fluid grace.'
Nicely put; and indeed I saw Ascroft at the awards ceremony, drinking fluids with considerable grace. It was a good night. Arts minister Paul Goldsmith was there. Miriama Kamo was a gracious and regal MC. Huzzah, most of all, to the winners of the 2025 awards. They deserve their loot and more so they deserve the most important thing: to be read.
JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
GENERAL NONFICTION AWARD
Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins)
BOOKHUB AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATIVE NONFICTION
Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis (Auckland University Press)
MARY AND PETER BIGGSY PRIZE FOR POETRY
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale (Otago University Press)
HUBERT CHURCH PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST WORK OF FICTION
Poorhara by Michelle Rahurahu (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
JESSIE MACKAY PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF POETRY
Manuali'I by Rex Letoa Paget (Saufo'i Press)
JUDITH BINNEY PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF ILLUSTRATED NONFICTION
Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa by Kirsty Baker (Auckland University Press)
EH McCORMICK PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK OF GENERAL NONFICTION
The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
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