Press Release - VUP Celebrates Best First Book With First E-Book

Victoria University Press is delighted to congratulate Anna Taylor winner of the (NZSA) Best First Book Award for her book of short stories Relief.

To celebrate, we are excited to announce the release of Relief as our first e-book, along with praised new author Pip Adam's short stories, Everything We Hoped For.

We are also thrilled to congratulate Bernadette Hall and Brian Turner, poetry finalists, who will have e-versions of their books released with further VUP titles in the near future. All our e-books are available via our on-line catalogue at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/ in conjunction with mebooks.co.nz.

Relief introduces an astonishingly mature and confident new voice in  New Zealand fiction. Emily Perkins says: These are wonderful stories, exquisitely observed and recorded with delicacy and wit.
The stories effortlessly mix the menacing and the comic, and handle real-life situations with warmth and subtlety. A little girl out of her depth in her friendship with an adult neighbour; an armed intruder thwarted by a bee; a woman determined to believe in her brother's goodness under the shadow of accusation; a Christmas dinner guest who will eat only peas...


Anna Taylor (pic left Victotia Birkinshaw) was born in 1982. She completed the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2006, and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for the manuscript she wrote during that year, which became Relief.

Taylor has produced a superb debut collection, is unafraid to turn calamities into blessings, and writes with the elegance and composure of a silversmith. I can't wait to read what she does next.       - Paula Green NZ HERALD