There’s nowhere to hide with a short story. It must say a lot by saying very little. With its spiky confidence and mordant humour, short story collection Bug Week is a knockout from start to finish. Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly wound and remarkably assured collection. Atmospheric and refined, these stories evoke a strong sense of quiet unease, slow burning rage and the absurdly comic. Guest international co-judge Tommy Orange said, “I was consistently surprised by sentences, the beauty and singular language. If the book were a bug it would be a big one, with teeth and venom, with wings and a surprising heart, possibly several, beating on every page with life."

The recipes in Monique Fiso’s first, extraordinary book occupy fewer than half of its pages. The rest is a tour de force of Māori knowledge, written from a Māori perspective. For many of us this will be our introduction to the indigenous cuisine of our own land, and its ingredients, practice, culture, history and knowledge. Fiso’s text is hard-won, inspiring and utterly original in scope; the book is also beautifully designed and photographed. The judges were all drawn to it, coming back to it again and again; finding a careful, kind and generous work which never lectured, but took them on a journey and left them hungry for more.

When Ralph Hotere asked his old friend to write his biography, Vincent O’Sullivan hesitated. As a Pākehā, and an outsider to the art world, was he the right person for the job? Hotere saw no problem. This is a sensitive, detailed portrait of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important modern artists, shaped around the four pou of Hotere’s identity: his Māoritanga, faith, whenua, and whānau. O'Sullivan displays masterly skill in the layering of information, observation and anecdote. He gives us a deep understanding of the forces and passions that drove one of New Zealand's greatest artists. The judges commended Vincent O’Sullivan for an extraordinary achievement in biography.

He kupu Hautoa mō Mātāmua ko te Kupu!

Mātāmua ko te kupu! Koinei te kōrero a Tā Tākuta Tīmoti Kāretu, ka mutu, kāore i tua atu i a ia hei whakatauira i tēnei tauākī āna, i ōna hekenga werawera ki te reo i āna kaupapa huhua, mai, mai. Ko tana mahi hoki tērā mō te reo i ngā mahi a Tānerore, e tātai mai ana i roto i tana pukapuka nei, āna kitenga, ōna mōhiotanga, huri noa i tana takahi i roto i tērā ao hei kaihaka, hei kaitito, hei kaiako, hei kaiwhakawā, anō hoki. Tō tātou māri hoki kua kōpakina ōna whakaaro ki āna anō kupu ki te reo, i roto hoki i te wana, me te kupu horipū.

Lyric is paramount! This is the axiom of Tā Tīmoti Kāretu, and there is no other than he who best personifies this statement in all his labours for the Māori language over countless years. His efforts for te reo in traditional Māori performing arts are also recounted in this book, his views and knowledge informed by his journey in that realm as a performer, a composer, a tutor and a judge. We are fortunate that his reflections are encapsulated in his own words in the Māori language with such passion and candour.

Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book is an enthralling performance, from Pati Solomona Tyrell’s striking dried-blood and plaster-masked cover, to the titles, to the spell-binding poems within. The violence of shared and fractured histories surfaces throughout the collection like liquefaction, unsettling, displacing, disrupting. In a year of outstanding poetry publications that respond to Covid, Black Lives Matter, the Christchurch Massacre, and ongoing violence against women, Avia expresses the outrage shared by many, while maintaining faith that love helps the healing process. This is a book bursting with alofa, profound pantoums, profanity and FafSwaggering stances, garrulously funny, bleakly satirical, magnificent.