News from Ockham Book Awards
Whanganui writer Airini Beautrais has won the $57,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her book
Bug Week – the first person to take out the category for a collection of short stories in more than a decade.
Beautrais is well-known as a poet, but this is her first book of fiction, published by Victoria University Press. She received the prize ahead of acclaimed novelists Catherine Chidgey and Pip Adam, both previous winners, and Brannavan Gnanalingam, shortlisted for the fiction prize in 2018.
The Fiction category’s convenor of judges, Kiran Dass, says
‘Knockout’ short story collection wins country’s richest writing prize Whanganui writer Airini Beautrais has won the $57,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her book Bug Week – the first person .
A collection of “unhappy love stories”, 10 years in the making is in contention for New Zealand’s top fiction prize – though its author says she has already had her happy ever after. Bug Week & Other Stories, the debut short-story collection by writer and poet Airini Beautrais, is one of four works shortlisted in the fiction category at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Beautrais told the Guardian that she was pleased to have made the.