The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2026

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Muru is not revenge. Muru is about balance. You put your hands on one of theirs and they had every right to take from you and yours whatever they meant to take, short of a life. Aotearoa in the 1940s, and the Maori men of Taranaki have refused to join the Maori battalion because of the severity of their land...

Best-selling author Dominic Hoey's much-anticipated third novel. It's 1985 and Obi is on the cusp of teenagehood, after a childhood marked by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, (dis)organised crime, and street violence. His father is delusional, his mother is dying, the Rainbow Warrior is bombed, and it's time for Obi to grow up and get out of the arcade. When he...

Rita considered the dead. Shut her eyes. Rolled their names around her brain. Stacked each person in order like folded laundry, warm and crisp from the sun. She wondered how her name would sound amongst them. In the rural reaches of Auckland, the women of the eclectic Gordon family gather for Christmas. They may push each other's buttons, but know...

Alone in the wilderness Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa is an inspiring memoir by award-winning journalist Naomi Arnold. She spends nearly nine months walking the length of New Zealand on Te Araroa, fulfilling a 20-year dream. On her own, she traverses mountains, rivers, cities, and plains from summer to spring, enduring days of thick mud, blazing sun,...

Wise, candid, brave and moving, this superbly written memoir by a New Zealand GP is reminiscent of the warm wisdom and humanity of the American physician and writer Atul Gawande. Over her long career, Dr Lucy O’Hagan has developed deep insights into the profound but often complex relationship between patients and doctors. Reading about her own struggle with what it...

In Polkinghorne, literary journalist Steve Braunias takes readers on an extraordinary and often chilling journey through the most high-profile murder case in modern New Zealand history. With unparalleled access to the key players, Braunias offers readers his unique insight into the investigation, the trial, and the astonishing revelations that kept the New Zealand public utterly transfixed. The death of Pauline...

In a sinisterly skewed version of England in 1979, thirteen-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a New Forest home, part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme. Each day the boys must take medicine to protect themselves from a mysterious illness to which many of their friends have succumbed. Children who survive are allowed to move...

Fifty Years of the Waitangi Tribunal celebrates decisions, results and reports of the Waitangi Tribunal over half a century. The Waitangi Tribunal has been a unique and integral part of the Aotearoa New Zealand judicial and legislative process, upholding te Tiriti o Waitangi and providing expertise on historical claims, Maori language, land, resources and contemporary issues.This collection contains chapters on...

Te Motu Kairangi Miramar Peninsula, Wellington 1912. Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters—seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna—have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito,...

Never Let Me Go meets Zone of Interest. A creepy, compelling novel that takes place in a version of our world where some lives are valued less than others. It will shock you with each new revelation. England, 1979. Vincent, Lawrence, and William are the last remaining residents of a secluded New Forest home, part of the government's Sycamore Scheme....

The Covid Response by Shaun Hendy explores how some scientists have prepared for a moment like the pandemic for decades. New Zealand's pandemic response delivered one of the lowest Covid-19 health burdens in the world, thanks to early elimination and high vaccination rates. While border controls and early lockdowns were strict, domestic freedoms ultimately exceeded those in other advanced economies,...

The alpacas are nervous. Accusations are flying about a rigged election, a mysterious illness is spreading, the Alpaca News is being censored by higher powers, and skullduggery is threatening the Breeders Showcase. Amidst a mass of self-interested parties, a forthright vet and a diplomatic engineer strive to protect the herds and restore democracy. By turns vital, farcical, heartbreaking and chilling,...

The Hollows Boys tells the story of the helicopter deer recovery era in Fiordland through the lives of three brothers: Gary, Mark, and Kim Hollows. There is the usual daredevil 'boy’s own adventure' side of the story, with extreme competition between pilots and huge sums of money at stake. But there is also the strange phenomenon of luck, the roll...

The debut collection of poetry from Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) is a series of goodbyes and attempts to slow the shedding. It's a group of teenagers sparking up as they watch the great pacific garbage patch catapult into space and become a second moon, it's endless conversations with Grandmama about stars, it is the constant rebirth...

Grace Yee's follow-up to her triple award-winning poetry collection Chinese Fish. In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo, the remains of more than a thousand 'chinamen' lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were sojourners from the Canton region in south China who found themselves unable to return to their homeland. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences...

I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across...

Mark Adams is one of Aotearoa New Zealand's foremost photographers. His focus on Samoan tatau, Māori-Pākehā interactions in Rotorua, carved meeting houses, locations of significance for Ngāi Tahu in Te Waipounamu, and Captain James Cook's landing sites reflect his deep engagement with our postcolonial and Pacific histories. This first-ever comprehensive survey of his work honours one of our most distinguished...

In the cold Wellington winter, Omar’s grades are slipping, his mum is unwell, and his best friend is growing distant. Two decades earlier in Mogadishu, Asha and Yasser are falling in love and starting to build a life together while a burgeoning war threatens to take it away. Before the Winter Ends explores the relationship between mother and son across...

"If sometimes I think of thoughts as being behind the eyes, sometimes I think of them more as floating, in a kind of cloud around the outside of my head." Part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, part poetics, a book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as...

A luscious tribute to an early New Zealand botanical artist, Groundwork is part inspired creative endeavour and part determined detective work. This long overdue book brings to light one of New Zealand's most significant botanical artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just as Emily Harris's beautiful paintings occupy a liminal space between scientific botanical illustration and art, so...

The pivotal year of 1870 brought down the curtain on the redcoat garrison world at both the metropolitan and colonial ends of the empire... In fewer than forty years, less than a lifetime, Aotearoa had gone from being a Maori world in which rangatira dominated, to a colony in which the settler state was in control of the economy, politics...

For most New Zealanders, Manapouri is associated with the country's largest and most successful environmental protest, but there is another, less well-known narrative of this time. The struggle to drill a tailrace tunnel under a rocky mountain at Manapouri, blast out a cavernous machine hall at West Arm, and carve a road over the treacherous Wilmot Pass is a powerful...

'A signally important text in the canon of Maori history.' - Michael Stevens The dynamics of an evolving southern world are mapped by distinguished archaeologist Atholl Anderson in a new edition of his groundbreaking book from 1998. The Welcome of Strangers traces the early migrations of Waitaha and Kati Mamoe people and the later arrival and settlement of Ngai Tahu....

Sam Mahon, a Christchurch artist, activist, conservationist, writer, and subversive, is renowned for his sculpture of Hon Nick Smith nude and squatting over a glass of water. With his latest work, How To Paint A Nude, Mahon is sure to cause controversy with a wonderfully written yet dangerously close to reality fiction set within the real world of the Canterbury...

An Uncommon Land is a story of enclosure, dispossession, colonisation and – ultimately – hope for a better future. Through the lens of her ancestors’ stories, Catherine Knight throws light on the genesis and evolution of the commons, its erosion through enclosure and the ascendency of private property in parallel with the rise of capitalism – a history that has...

As a boy, Tony had drawn maps and diagrams and medieval battle scenes. He'd read fairy tales and been enchanted by local sites of Māori history. As a young man, he was a vagrant on the streets of Paris, was twice imprisoned, spent time in a mental hospital, battled destructive addictions, and experienced unrequited love and loneliness. All of this...

Certainly, there was an uneasiness to the place. Certainly, I felt like we didn't belong there. Clay Eaters traverses a network of fault lines diverging and converging at unexpected angles: a mysterious jungle island, military reconnaissance training, the spirits in the trees and abandoned temples, old family homes, the echoes across rooms, the dining table set for the archetypal feast....

In the Atlas of the New Zealand Wars, five decades of maps and plans from 1834 to 1884 provide remarkable new insight into the deep conflicts running through nineteenth-century Aotearoa. Beginning with early skirmishes off the Taranaki coast and at the Chathams, Volume One follows the tracks inland from the Bay of Islands towards the Hokianga in the Northern Wars;...

I stored my plan for world peace safely in my coat pocket, and then I washed the coat. Sick Power Trip is Erik Kennedy's most personal and vulnerable book yet. These are poems that tell us: the world is unwell, and sometimes writers are, too. Kennedy scrutinises the broken social contract and the dangerous actors who seem determined to dominate...

The relationship between tākata and whenua—people and land—is a long thread that weaves through the art history of Aotearoa New Zealand. Beginning in Te Waipounamu, our greenstone isle, and reaching outwards, across Aotearoa and beyond to Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific, Whenua thoughtfully explores themes of identity and belonging, kaitiakitaka (guardianship), land use, migration, environmentalism, and activism through historical and contemporary...

Books of Mana celebrates the rich tradition of Maori authorship in Aotearoa New Zealand. It reveals the central place of over 200 years of print literacy within te ao Maori and vividly conveys how books are understood as taonga tuku iho - treasured items handed down through generations. In this beautifully illustrated collection of essays, some of Aotearoa New Zealand's...

Marketing executive Alison Morris bets her reputation on a project to sell empathy in a perfume bottle. Her husband, Jim, is inspired to try a similar thing in a game he’s developing—sinking all their money into EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication. All at once, Alison’s fragrance develops dangerous effects and Jim’s game...