Otago Art Book Receives International Indie Award

Hauaga: The Art of John Pule, edited by Nicholas Thomas and published by Otago University Press, has won the Bronze Medal for Best Regional (New Zealand/Australia) Non-Fiction in the 15th Annual Independent Publisher Book Awards 2011.

This is the first year the Award has had an Australia/New Zealand category. ‘We jumped at this opportunity,’ says publisher Wendy Harrex. ‘The local book awards require NZ citizenship or residency for the author/editor, which disqualified our book.’

The ‘IPPY’ Awards, as they are known colloquially, first launched in 1996 in the United States and are designed ‘to recognise the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers, and bring them to the attention of booksellers, buyers, librarians, and book lovers around the world.’

This year, medallists were chosen from 3,907 total entries: 3,059 in the national (USA) categories and 848 in the regional categories. The award-winners were honoured at a gala awards ceremony in New York on May 23^rd.

John Pule is one of the most powerful and original artists of the new Oceania. From the mid-1990s his powerful, enigmatic and personal paintings attracted great interest, and his work came to be widely shown. Famously inspired by hiapo, the innovative barkcloths of nineteenth-century Niue, Pule has been fascinated by the Polynesian past and present, but his work ranges far more widely, responding both to ancestral culture, and to the global terror and violence of our time. This is the first book to deal with his art. In Hauaga, essays by leading writers – Peter Brunt, Gregory O’Brien, Nicholas Thomas – and an interview with John Pule provide several routes into his engaging and compelling works.

An associated touring exhibition of John Pule’s work, curated by the Wellington City Art Gallery, will open in Christchurch later in 2011 and in Auckland in 2012. Since its release in June 2010, Hauaga has received outstanding critical and public reception and was most recently named one of the top 100 books of 2010 by the New Zealand Listener.