Montana NZ winners announced

Date: August 2, 2007 | Discussion: No Comments

Winners of the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards have been announced. The awards, given annually to the best writing in New Zealand, were this year dominated by Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, which won the Medal (main prize), and was selected as the fiction winner by both the panel as well as the readers. Janet Frame, meanwhile, won the Poetry Prize for her posthumous collection The Goose Bath.

Works awarded this year in the fiction categories are:

MEDAL FOR FICTION OR POETRY, FICTION WINNER, READERS’ CHOICE AWARD: Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones

In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives. On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations. So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.

You can read more about Mister Pip at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.

FICTION RUNNER UP: The Cowboy Dog
by Nigel Cox

When Chester Farlowe’s father is killed, Chester is forced to leave the vast cattle ranches of New Zealand’s central volcanic plateau for the badlands of urban Auckland. Henry Stroud, proprietor of the I Fry takeaway wagon, takes him under his wing and rechristens him “Mr. Dog.” Still full of anger six years later, Chester sets out to plot revenge on his father’s killer and finds that he must contend with Boss Lennox, the Sultation Kid, and the seductive and inscrutable Miss Peet before he gets to the showdown. This mythical story reconfigures the New Zealand experience with an absorbing coming-of-age tale.

You can read more about The Cowboy Dog at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.

FICTION RUNNER UP: The Fainter
by Damien Wilkins

Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.

POETRY: The Goose Bath
by Janet Frame

Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.

BEST FIRST FICTION: The Sound of Butterflies
by Rachael King

Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.

BEST FIRST POETRY: Secret Heart
by Airini Beautrais

Unfortunately, no description is available for this work.

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Filed under Commonwealth literature, Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Winners.

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