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The 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Winners

Celebrate all the winners of the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Explore the powerful fiction of Ingrid Horrocks' 'All Her Lives', winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction through to the debut poetry collection from the winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 'Black Sugarcane' by Nafanua Purcell Kersel. Discover the amazing selection of wonderful authors in Aotearoa!

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1
A Different Kind of Power
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A Different Kind of Power

ByJacinda Ardern

What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remarkable story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be. When Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister at age thirty-seven, the world took notice. But it was her compassionate yet powerful response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, resulting in swift and sweeping gun control laws, that demonstrated her remarkable leadership. She guided her country through unprecedented challenges—a volcanic eruption, a major biosecurity incursion, and a...

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All Her Lives
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All Her Lives

ByIngrid Horrocks

All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture, and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance. From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son's climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures—and for finding hope. Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women—all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine, and carry forward—and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their...

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He Puawai
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He Puawai

ByPhilip Garnock-Jones

Aotearoa has at least 2,200 native species of flowering plants that have evolved in our unique conditions, and the vast majority of them grow nowhere else on earth. This has made New Zealand a natural laboratory for studies of flower biology and a vibrant wonderland of gardens and bush for Māori and Pākehā to enjoy. He Puawai is a natural history of New Zealand flowers, focusing on 100 native species to represent the full range of flower phenomena of Aotearoa - from familiar iconic flowers of kōwhai, manuka and pōhutukawa to oddities like the water-pollinated flowers of eelgrass, bat-pollinated blossoms of kiekie, and the world's smallest flowers, Wolffia. Each flower's text describes and explains its structure and functions, alongside over 500 remarkable photographs that enable the reader (with...

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Mr Ward's Map
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Mr Ward's Map

ByElizabeth Cox

Victorian Wellington street by street In 1891, a remarkable map of Wellington was made by surveyor Thomas Ward. It recorded the footprint of every building, from Thorndon in the north and across the teeming, inner-city slums of Te Aro to Berhampore in the south. Updated regularly over the next 10 years, it detailed hotels, theatres, oyster saloons, brothels, shops, stables, Parliament, the remnants of Maori kainga, the Town Belt, the prisons, the ‘lunatic asylum’, the hospital and much more, in detail so particular that it went right down to the level of the street lights. Luxuriously packaged with a cloth case and fold-out jacket, Mr Ward’s Map uses this giant map and historic images to tell marvellous stories about a vital capital city, its neighbourhoods and its people...

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Pastoral Care
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Pastoral Care

ByJohn Prins

In Pastoral Care, Auckland writer John Prins gives us nine clear-eyed, witty and beautifully written stories centred on daily life in twenty-first-century Aotearoa New Zealand. On the shores of Lake Pukaki; in kitchens, bedrooms and Lego-strewn living rooms; at school events; walking the dog, pushing a buggy, or stuck in traffic with a child kicking the back of the driver’s seat—Prins blends wry humour and emotional depth to illuminate the dark gulf between youthful dreams and the reality of adult obligations. John Prins reinvigorates the tradition of social realism in New Zealand short fiction, investing character, scene and dialogue with a distinctive, engaging voice. Often moving, frequently funny, and always relatable, Pastoral Care marks the arrival of a bold new voice in New Zealand fiction. Pastoral Care is...

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Black Sugarcane
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Black Sugarcane

ByNafanua Purcell Kersel

Black Sugarcane is a landmark debut collection by Nafanua Purcell Kersel. Restless in form and address, these engaging and generous poems ricochet from light to dark, quiet to loud, calm to violence. We meet a loved twin sister as she dives towards the Sacred Centre, a grandmother who knows everything by heart, a shrugging office clerk, and Nafanua herself, an enigmatic shapeshifter. At the heart of Black Sugarcane is a sequence of erasure poems arising from the seminal essay 'In Search of Tagaloa' by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi. From the worlds contained in the text, these poems rise as if inevitable. Another sequence responds to the devastating tsunami that struck between the Samoan islands of Upolu and Tutuila in September 2009. Within the line, within the word...

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This Compulsion In Us
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This Compulsion In Us

ByTina Makereti

It's not beautiful, not at all, when it's there in front of you, but writing transforms. Makereti stands at the foot of her mounga and pays careful attention to tohu. With her tupuna at her elbow, she casts around for home, meets taonga in museums, and writes her way towards her father. She walks through the darkness with others, in awe of Te Kore, Te Po, and Te Ao Marama—a universe of potential being, dark and light. These are some of the kaupapa that underpin her work and her way of moving through the world, both enlivened and haunted by a compulsion to write. Included here are frank and moving essays about the wahine who have shown her many ways of being a Maori woman, the pain and...

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Te Ahua o nga Kupu Whakaari a Te Kooti
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Te Ahua o nga Kupu Whakaari a Te Kooti

ByTa Pou Temara

Ko Te Kooti Te Turuki Rikirangi tētahi o ngā maunga teitei o te wā – he kōkōrangi i ngā rā pōuri, he tokotoko i te awa kōpaka. I tū ia hei toa i te whare o Tūmatauenga, engari ki te Hāhi Ringatū, he poropiti – he matakite nāna i hāpai ngā moemoeā, ngā tūmanako, me ngā wairua o te iwi i ngā tau o te ngarohanga: te whenua, te oranga, te mana motuhake. I tōna ringa matau te pū me te riri, i tōna ringa māui te whakapono, ngā kupu whakaari, me te tohu rangimārie. Nā Te Kooti i hora atu ēnei kupu ki ngā marae o te motu, hei karere poropiti, hei tohu whakatūpato, hei māramatanga mō ngā uri whakatipu. He kupu e kōrero ana ki te...

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9
No Good
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No Good

BySophie van Waardenberg

In summer when I picked dandelionsfor the geriatric guinea pig I changed the world.I killed a weed. I filled a mouth with gold. In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at its heart a sequence of emotionally raw ‘Cremation Sonnets’. In its essence, this collection is the poet exploring ‘goodness’: ‘I am unbegrudging. I am the openest pair of arms’, she tells us. ‘I am a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.’ I cannot accept this ending. I have fallenfrom the highest ledge. I will never land.So what if I am safe? I am not.

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