Former New Zealand Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern’s first book, A Different Kind of Power, has made the shortlist of the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Ardern’s memoir is one of four finalists announced yesterday in the awards’ General Non-Fiction category. She is up against journalist and natural history writer Naomi Arnold’s Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa; TV producer/director, documentary maker and writer Peta Carey’s The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era; and This Compulsion in Us by novelist, essayist, short story writer and creative writing teacher Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā).
The awards’ General Non-Fiction category convenor of judges Philip Matthews says the shortlisted books are highly readable works that give honest impressions of this country and its people.
“The final four were elevated by artful writing and personal reflections that also offered profound insights. Each came as a surprise, even to those who thought they knew the story,” he adds.
The four General Non-Fiction finalists are joined on the shortlist by a further 12 writers, across the genres of fiction, poetry, history, botany, art and te ao Māori. These 16 finalists were selected by panels of specialist judges from a longlist of 44 books across four categories: fiction, poetry, illustrated non-fiction and general non-fiction.
Internationally acclaimed New Zealand writer Catherine Chidgey is in the running for the awards’ $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction with The Book of Guilt. She has won the award twice before – the only author to have done so – for The Wish Child in 2017 and The Axeman’s Carnival in 2023.
Contesting Chidgey for this, the country’s richest writing prize, is creative writing teacher, poet, travel writer and essayist Ingrid Horrocks with All Her Lives; poet and short story writer Laura Vincent (Ngāti Māhanga, Ngāpuhi) with Hoods Landing; and artist and author Sam Mahon with How to Paint a Nude.
The awards’ fiction category convenor of judges, Craig Cliff, says these four books indicate the breadth and brio of fiction being produced in Aotearoa today.
“You laugh, you shudder, you are pulled along by character and voice and plot. Set in different time periods and across the globe, these four authors speak directly to the contemporary concerns of New Zealanders. How free are we really? How much have attitudes to gender and sexuality actually changed? What might be killing us and what sustains us?” he says.
As in previous years, the fiction panel will be joined by an overseas judge when it makes its deliberations about the winner. This year that judge is Leslie Hurtig, the artistic director of the Vancouver Writers Fest and a respected Canadian literary juror.
The finalists in the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry are poet and academic Anna Jackson for Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts; poet and critic Erik Kennedy for Sick Power Trip; and debut poets Sophie van Waardenberg for No Good and Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) for Black Sugarcane.
“As judges we were filled with imagination and excitement, and we were also torn by the reasoning, culture, storytelling and language of the high-quality poetry collections in this year’s submissions,” says category convenor of judges Daren Kamali. “We salute the four finalists, from the island realness of Black Sugarcane and the love, loss and distance in No Good, to long COVID in Sick Power Trip and the shape and form of Terrier, Worrier.”
The authors in the running for the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction are emeritus professor of history Charlotte Macdonald for Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire; first-time author and emeritus professor of botany Philip Garnock-Jones for He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers; art curator Sarah Farrar for Mark Adams: A Survey – He Kohinga Whakaahua; and historian Elizabeth Cox for Mr Ward's Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street.
The category’s convenor of judges Lauren Gutsell says books that complicate what we think about ourselves, our history, and the land we live on comprise this year’s shortlist.
“These four titles each bring new understandings of their subject matter, not only through research and narrative but through photography, artwork, illustration, and mapping. Each book makes a notable contribution to our understanding of our country,” she says.
Nicola Legat, spokesperson for the New Zealand Book Awards Trust Te Ohu Tiaki i Te Rau Hiringa, says this year’s shortlisted books are fresh, reflective, and pack a punch.
“It’s a very exciting finalist list – 16 titles that readers of any genre will enjoy. They have been beautifully crafted by their authors and produced with great care by their publishers. The Book Awards Trust salutes them all.”
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