Espiner v Espiner at Ockham prize
In an otherwise tremendously unsurprising and even really quite unremarkable longlist for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand book awards, announced this morning, a strange history has been made with a separated couple competing in the same category – the first time it appears that such a thing has happened at New Zealand’s national book prize.
There’s a Cure for This: A Memoir by Emma Espiner is longlisted alongside The Drinking Game by Guyon Espiner in the nonfiction award. The couple separated in 2023.
I asked three distinguished authors with a combined age of 259 years – that’s a lot of collective memory – whether they could think of a literary couple who had competed in the same category in the same year at the book awards. They all drew a blank. “I think it could be a first,” said the 85-year-old. “I have never heard of such a thing,” said the 91-year-old. What about longtime lovers Maurice Shadbolt and Marilyn Duckworth? Nope: the 83-year-old pointed out that Duckworth’s novel Disorderly Conduct won the fiction prize in 1984, and Shadbolt’s Season of the Jew won it in 1987.
The books by the Espiners could go on to compete in the shortlist, announced on March 6.
Guyon Espiner, who quit the booze in 2019, wrote The Drinking Game as an investigation into the politics and history of alcohol culture in New Zealand. “An important book,” wrote Michael Burgess in Kete. Emma Espiner’s There’s a Cure for This is an elegantly written collection of 17 essays. Amy McDaid wrote in Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books, “Espiner’s tales of debauched student life at Otago, her anxieties as a mother, and the trials of student doctor life are springboards into deeper conversations around intergenerational trauma, its ramifications for Māori, and how the systems we’ve set up do not always serve our most vulnerable.”
As for the rest of the longlist, it’s generally much as expected. The big three of Eleanor Catton, Catherine Chidgey and Emily Perkins are all nominated in the fiction prize. Personal grievance: no room for The Waters by Carl Nixon or the year’s most talked-about novel, The Bone Tree by Airana Ngarewa.
In poetry, Big Fat Brown Bitch by Tusiata Avia will compete with the quite dissimilar Say I Do This: Poems 2018–2022 by CK Stead. Personal grievance: no room for Āria by Jessica Hinerangi.
In illustrated nonfiction, I was delighted that five of the books I named in ReadingRoom as the best of the year have made the longlist, including the bestseller Our Land in Colour: A History of Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960 by Brendan Graham with Jock Phillips. Personal grievance: no Rewi by Jade Kake & Jeremy Hansen.
I named Commune: Chasing a Utopian Dream in Aotearoa by Olive Jones as the best nonfiction book of 2023; great to see it on the Ockham longlist. Personal grievance: it was a bit of a stinker of a year for nonfiction but Ockham judges, for the second year, have been allowed to go beyond 10 books and quite unnecessarily dumped 14 titles, several of them pretty average, onto the longlist.
Choosing a longlist is essentially a no-brainer. Choosing a shortlist is very much a brainer, as well as a matter of whim, temperament, personal taste, and cultural awareness; congratulations to all the books on the 2024 Ockham longlist, and good luck to all the authors as they await the March 6 cut.
The full longlist is as below. Books marked in bold indicate the titles I hope make the shortlist; books placed at the top of each list indicate the titles I hope win.
JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Audition by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Backwaters by Emma Ling Sidnam (Text Publishing)
Pet by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Bird Life by Anna Smaill (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
A Better Place by Stephen Daisley (Text Publishing)
Ruin and Other Stories by Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Turncoat by Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) (Lawrence & Gibson)
Signs of Life by Amy Head (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
BOOKSELLERS AOTEAROA NZ AWARD FOR ILLUSTRATED NONFICTION
Through Shaded Glass: Women and Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960 by Lissa Mitchell (Te Papa Press)
Don Binney: Flight Path by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press)
Flora: Celebrating our Botanical World edited by Carlos Lehnebach, Claire Regnault, Rebecca Rice, Isaac Te Awa (Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Ngā Puhi) and Rachel Yates (Te Papa Press)
Our Land in Colour: A History of Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960 by Brendan Graham with Jock Phillips (HarperCollins NZ)
Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History by Ryan Bodman (Bridget Williams Books)
Sure to Rise: The Edmonds Story by Peter Alsop, Kate Parsonson and Richard Wolfe (Canterbury University Press)
Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills by Lauren Gutsell, Lucy Hammonds and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)
Ngā Kaihanga Uku: Māori Clay Artists by Baye Riddell (Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-a-Ruataupare) (Te Papa Press)
Pacific Arts Aotearoa edited by Lana Lopesi (Penguin Random House)
Fungi of Aotearoa: A Curious Forager’s Field Guide by Liv Sisson (Penguin Random House)
GENERAL NONFICTION
Commune: Chasing a Utopian Dream in Aotearoa by Olive Jones (Potton & Burton)
There’s a Cure for This: A Memoir by Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) (Penguin)
The Drinking Game by Guyon Espiner (Allen & Unwin)
An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books)
The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa by Catherine Comyn (Ngāti Ranginui) (Economic and Social Research Aotearoa)
Laughing at the Dark: A Memoir by Barbara Else (Penguin, Penguin Random House)
End Times by Rebecca Priestley (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Ngātokimatawhaorua: The Biography of a Waka by Jeff Evans (Massey University Press)
Snorkelling the Abyss: One Woman, Striving to Survive, Fighting for Survivors by Jan Jordan (The Cuba Press)
Ora: Healing Ourselves – Indigenous Knowledge, Healing and Wellbeing edited by Leonie Pihama (Te Ātiawa, Ngā Māhanga ā Tairi, Waikato) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou, Tūhourangi) (Huia Publishers)
The Forgotten Prophet: Tāmati Te Ito and His Kaingārara Movement by Jeffrey Sissons (Bridget Williams Books)
Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand by Jared Davidson (Bridget Williams Books)
Takahē: Bird of Dreams by Alison Ballance (Potton & Burton)
Soundings: Diving for Stories in the Beckoning Sea by Kennedy Warne (Massey University Press)
MARY AND PETER BIGGSY AWARD FOR POETRY
Say I Do This: Poems 2018–2022 by C. K. Stead (Auckland University Press)
The Artist by Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Big Fat Brown Bitch by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
When I Reach for Your Pulse by Rushi Vyas (Otago University Press)
Chinese Fish by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing)
Biter by Claudia Jardine (Auckland University Press)
At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press)
Root Leaf Flower Fruit by Bill Nelson (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) (Dead Bird Books)
Calamities! by Jane Arthur (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
