Craig Cliff On the NZ Post Book Awards 2011 (but mostly just the best first book o' fiction)

Lifted from Craig Cliff's blog, This Fluid Thrill

Congratulations to Pip Adam, winner of the 2011 NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction for her short story collection, Everything We Hoped For.

I interviewed Pip in July last year on this blog. It’s a good read, if I do say so myself.

Along with Pip and myself, there was another great new Kiwi short story writer surfing the New Wave in 2010: Tina Makereti (also interviewed here). The latest news is that Tina’s book, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa is being studied at Harvard, so there are honours all round.

But back to the NZ Post Book Awards. In addition to the First Book Winners (fiction, poetry, non-fiction) being announced today (with no shortlists), the short-lists for the best books were also announced.

There’ll always be comments about the one’s that missed out, especially so with only three short-listed slots each for fiction and poetry. So there’s no Lloyd Jones or Patrick Evans (see my thoughts on Gifted here), but there is space for Laurence Fearnley’s The Hut Builder (which I wasn't mad about), Tim Wilson’s Their Faces Were Shining and Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Night Book

Link here to read Craig's full post. I regard it as a gracious response from a writer who for my money should have been short-listed for his remarkable short story collectionl A Man Melting. I guess he can take consolation in his Commonwealth Writers Prize, a far more important award on the world stage than our local one.