PhD Creative Writing candidates win NZ Post Book Awards Best First Books
Helen Heath and Lawrence Patchett have won the Poetry and Fiction Best First Books categories.
Graft by current PhD candidate Helen Heath won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book for Poetry while recent graduate Lawrence Patchett won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book for Fiction with his short story collection, I Got His Blood on Me . Both debuts were published by Victoria University Press.
The judges commented that the overall quality of this year's Best First Books was so strong that many could easily have been finalists of the New Zealand Post Book Awards in their own right.
'Helen Heath is a candid poet, unflinching, both with what she sees close to her and in the mirror, but capable of great generosity too. Her mother is so beautifully evoked that we feel we know her. Some of the poems are so sad they ache. This is a brave, moving, revealing and assured collection.
'We congratulate Lawrence on his originality, his skills as a story teller, and the welcome audacity of a short story collection which ranges from playing with history, to magic realism, to a tougher kind of realism entirely: all of it somehow plausible. We can't wait to see what Lawrence Patchett does next.'
Quinn Berentson's book Moa: The life and death of New Zealand's legendary bird won the Non-Fiction Award.
The category finalists in the New Zealand Post Book Awards will be announced next week, and the winners will be revealed during a star-studded literary awards ceremony in Auckland on 28 August.
Read more on the Booksellers.