Thursday, 1 July 2021, 9:51 am
Going West Festival’s 26th season is dialing it up,
offering four multi-media Saturday evening events featuring
Aotearoa’s finest writers of prose, poetry and music once
a month from August.
Launching on Saturday 14 August,
the richly layered new-format offers something for everyone
with a love of reading and ideas.
“Going West
Festival is 25 years old this year. We want to demonstrate
our commitment to the next quarter century with a fresh
programming approach. There will be live music, oratory,
performance and kōrero taking place, as well as pop up
performances and installations, on multiple stages, with
Press Release – Going West Festival
Going West Festival’s 26th season is dialing it up, offering four multi-media Saturday evening events featuring Aotearoa’s finest writers of prose, poetry and music once a month from August.
Launching on Saturday 14 August, the richly layered new-format offers something for everyone with a love of reading and ideas.
“Going West Festival is 25 years old this year. We want to demonstrate our commitment to the next quarter century with a fresh programming approach. There will be live music, oratory, performance and kōrero taking place, as well as pop up performances and installations, on multiple stages, with refreshments available throughout the evening.
Press Release – Ockham Book Awards
The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards is a highly anticipated event on the annual arts calendar, and one category that continues to gain interest is the Best First Book Awards, sponsored by MitoQ.
The Best First Book Awards recognise work of quality by an author for whom the entry is their first published book. For the third year running, MitoQ has sponsored the category, giving new writers a financial boost and recognition to help them focus on pursuing a writing career.
The Best First Book Awards category has seen steady growth in submission numbers since its introduction to the Book Awards in 1996. In 2021, 50 books entered were from debut authors, nearly a third of all submissions.
Fiso won the first book award for illustrated non-fiction for her
Hiakai: Modern Māori “
Hiakai weaves understanding of our unique environment, hunting, foraging, cooking, eating and preserving into an expansive but very accessible offering. Fiso does not shy away from unusual ingredients and this makes it all the more fascinating,” judge Dale Cousens said. Kerr won for her
Ross Giblin/Stuff
Chef Monique Fiso at her restaurant Hiakai. Judge Kiran Dass said Kerr’s novel impressed with its “big-hearted social realism . which follows the quiet heroics of a widowed solo mother of squeezed means”. “Sensitively examining the emotional and mental labour of being careful with money and the blind spots people have when they don’t need to worry about it, this quietly powerful novel is about privilege, community, compassion and care,” Dass said.
Whanganui writer Airini Beautrais has won the premier award at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her book
Bug Week - it s her first book of fiction and it s also the first time the category has been won by a collection of short stories in more than a decade.
Airini Beautrais.
Photo: Tracy Grant
Beautrais won the $57,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction with a book that convenor of judges Kiran Dass described as a knockout from start to finish. Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly-wound and remarkably assured collection. Atmospheric and refined, these stories evoke a strong sense of quiet unease, slow burning rage and the absurdly comic, Dass said.