2019 Awards
Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize
This Mortal Boy
Published by: Vintage, Penguin Random House
Fiona Kidman
In This Mortal Boy Fiona Kidman has written an intensely human and empathetic story, recreating the events leading to the real life hanging of “jukebox killer” Paddy Black at Mount Eden prison in 1955. With seeming effortlessness, she pulls the reader into mid-century New Zealand – the restlessness of a new urban youth culture, the moral panic that led to the Mazengarb report, the damning assumptions of the legal profession and the unchallenged omissions that eased the pathway to a young man’s death. Kidman draws her characters deftly, alternating between the bravado and vulnerability of Auckland’s young bodgie culture and the desperation of a poor and disempowered family in Ireland. The result is moving, memorable, authentic and urgently relevant to our times.
Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Are Friends Electric?
Published by: Victoria University Press
Helen Heath
Helen Heath’s collection impresses with its broad thematic reach, its willingness to tackle complex issues, and its poetic risk-taking. By turns thoughtful and moving, Are Friends Electric? asks how the material world might mediate—or replace—human relationships. The experimental first half uses found poems to engage how artifacts—sex dolls, buildings—become objects of human passion. Technology is situated in relation to the natural world, and to issues of gender, sexuality and power. The elegiac second half offers a touching speculative narrative: A woman embeds her deceased partner’s personality into software to avoid letting go. Heath asks if friends can—or should—be electric, and probes deeper questions about what it means to be human.
Illustrated Non-Fiction Award
Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing
Published by: Te Papa Press
Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot
Excellence in an illustrated work of non-fiction is to be found in the flawless integration of text, illustration and design. Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing is the exemplar of those goals. Creating a cohesive whole that incorporates multiple writers and a wide range of illustrations and artworks is a difficult task, and this publication achieves this with authority, style and integrity. It is a visual feast, and at the same time celebrates the tactile pleasure of a book in the hand, and should be acknowledged as a milestone in contemporary publishing. And, most importantly, quality design is met with innovative writing that both records and opens up new territory, creating a book that will expand and enrich the knowledge of readers throughout Aotearoa, the Moana Pacific and beyond.
