IIML Director and graduates on NZ Post Book Awards shortlist
Damien Willkins, Eleanor Catton and Marty Smith are among the 2014 finalists.
IIML Director Professor Damien Wilkins' seventh novel, Max Gate, and The Luminaries; the Man Booker Prize-winning second novel from MA in Creative Writing graduate Eleanor Catton, are finalists in the Fiction category of the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards. MA in Creative Writing graduate Marty Smith's debut collection Horse With Hat is a finalist in the Poetry category. Horse with Hat has already won the Awards' Best First Book of Poetry category.
All three books are published by Victoria University Press, which has five books on this year's shortlist. The winners will be announced on 27 August.
Max Gate (VUP 2013) revolves around the impending death of Thomas Hardy in 1928, and the fight for ownership of his legacy among family, friends, admirers and hangers on.
'This is Wilkins at his luminous best...Max Gate is a triumphant take on a literary heritage and on a period in history that resounds with contemporary concerns.'
–Anne Kennedy, Metro
Wilkins has previously won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction with The Miserables and a number of his other books have won or been shortlisted for major prizes, including the Montana Medal for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. He was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in 2008, and was made and Arts Foundation Laureate in 2013.
The Luminaries (VUP / Granta, 2013) is an astrological murder mystery set in the West Coast town of Hokitika during the 1860s Gold Rush. It has so far won the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.
'A dazzling feat of a novel...a pastiche quite unlike anything I've come across, so graceful is its plotting and structure.'
–The Guardian
Catton graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria in 2007. Her previous novel The Rehearsal (VUP 2008) was written during her MA year at the IIML, under Damien Wilkins' supervision. It went on to win major New Zealand and international awards and, at last count, had been published in twelve languages.
Horse with Hat (VUP 2014) is the first collection from poet Marty Smith who graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria in 2003. She is one of two first-time authors on the poetry shortlist, alongside fellow VUP poet Caolinn Hughes.
'This is a simply beautiful book. Marty Smith’s poems are by turns quirky, sad, punchy, amusing, thought-provoking, and above all they provide a sense of time and place and family.'
– Booksellers New Zealand
Read the Book Awards Press release and full list of finalists.