Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

About the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards

The New Zealand Book Awards ran as the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2006-2009), the New Zealand Post Book Awards (2010-2014) and the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2016-2025). No awards were held in 2015. Year is the ceremony year. Winners and finalists for 2006-2014 come from Christchurch City Libraries award pages (fallback; the official site lists winners only for those years). 2016-2017 longlists and finalists come from the official longlist and finalist news releases, and winners from the official past-winners page. 2018-2025 come from the official per-year winners, shortlist and longlist pages. Categories keep stable names across sponsor renames: the Acorn and Jann Medlicott Acorn prizes are Fiction, the Mary and Peter Biggs Award is Poetry, the Royal Society and later General Non-Fiction Award is General Non-Fiction, and the Booksellers and BookHub awards are Illustrated Non-Fiction. The Montana-era Illustrative category is mapped to Illustrated Non-Fiction. Its other non-fiction categories (Biography, History, Environment, Lifestyle & Contemporary Culture, Reference & Anthology) stay as their own categories. From 2010 non-fiction was split into General and Illustrated. Best first book awards are their own categories: Hubert Church (Best First Book: Fiction), Jessie Mackay (Best First Book: Poetry), E.H. McCormick (Best First Book: Non-Fiction until 2014, then Best First Book: General Non-Fiction) and Judith Binney (Best First Book: Illustrated Non-Fiction, from 2016). Ockham best first book awards are drawn from the longlist and have no published shortlist, so only winners appear. Levels: Winner; Honor for the Montana fiction runners-up; Finalist for shortlisted books; Longlist for longlisted books not shortlisted (Ockham only). Excluded: the Montana Medals and Book of the Year (they duplicate a category winner), People's and Readers' Choice and Booksellers' Choice (public or trade votes), the Maori Language Award, the reviewer awards, and the separate children's and young adult awards, which are a different program. Iwi affiliations in brackets are dropped from author names. Title spellings follow the books where the source has typos.

Organization: New Zealand Book Awards Trust. Years are award years, which can differ from publication years. Official site (opens in a new tab)