Professor Averil Coxhead, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, says, “It is wonderful to have staff so talented in describing both the world around them and the world inside them. Our faculty has the best creative writing programme in Aotearoa, and we’re pretty amazing at History and English Literature too!”
Shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction are International Institute of Modern Letters’ (IIML) lecturer Ingrid Horrocks for All Her Lives and alumna Catherine Chidgey for The Book of Guilt. Both books are published by Te Herenga Waka University Press (THWUP).
For the Mary and Peter Biggs Awards for Poetry, Professor Anna Jackson was shortlisted for Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts (AUP). Meanwhile, recent Emerging Pasifika Writer-in-Residence Nafanua Purcell Kersel is shortlisted for Black Sugarcane and fellow THWUP-published author Erik Kennedy is shortlisted for Sick Power Trip.
In the Illustrated Non-Fiction category, Emeritus Professor Charlotte Macdonald was shortlisted for Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire (Bridget Williams Books). Alumni Philip Garnock-Jones and Elizabeth Cox join Charlotte in this category, with He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers (AUP), and Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street (Massey University Press).
The General Non-fiction award is getting press for the inclusion of Jacinda Ardern, but it also includes IIML lecturer Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) for This Compulsion in Us (THWUP), and Peta Carey for The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three Brothers and the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era (Potton and Burton).
THWUP are celebrating the shortlisting of five of their books on their blog, noting, “A Catherine Chidgey win would be a remarkable feat—she has won the Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction twice before, for The Wish Child in 2017 and The Axeman’s Carnival in 2023.”
The winner of the fiction prize will receive $65,000, and each other main category winner will receive $12,000. The winners will be announced at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on 13 May.