Earlier this month, the Ockhams 2026 longlist was announced, and with the number of phenomenal books mentioned, I just have to share them with you all. The Ockhams are one of our biggest literary awards, covering fiction, poetry, illustrated non-fiction, and general non-fiction. From well-known authors to debut names, the longlists have so much to offer, so let’s see the contenders.

The following blurbs for fiction and poetry are taken from the websites of various publishing houses and presses. I have left the non-fiction nominees with their titles and authors, as many titles give enough information to garner what the text is about. I highly recommend looking up anything that catches your eye. I know I will be adding many of these titles to my library requests.

Nominees for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction:

1985 by Dominic Hoey – It’s 1985 and Obi’s on the cusp of teenagehood, after a childhood marked by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, (dis)organised crime and violence. His dad’s delusional, his mum’s real sick, the Rainbow Warrior just exploded, and it’s time for Obi to grow up and get out of the spacies parlour. When he and his best mate Al discover a map leading to unknown riches, Obi wonders if this windfall could be the thing that turns his family’s fortunes around. Instead, he’s thrown into an adventure where the stakes are a lot higher than the games he loves. An electric novel about life in a multi-cultural, counter-cultural part of Auckland pre-gentrification. 1985 is an adventure story with a local flavour, a coming-of-age story for the underdogs, the disenfranchised and the dreamers.

All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks – All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance. From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son’s climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures – and for finding hope. Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women – all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward – and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms.

Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed – In the cold Wellington winter, Omar’s grades are slipping, his mum is unwell, and his best friend is growing distant. Two decades earlier in Mogadishu, Asha and Yasser are falling in love and starting to build a life together while a burgeoning war threatens to take it away. Before the Winter Ends explores the relationship between mother and son across Aotearoa New Zealand, Somalia and Egypt as they search for understanding and try to bridge the distance between them. Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel is a stark portrayal of how the past illuminates the present and how grief shapes a family.

Empathy by Bryan Walpert – Marketing executive Alison Morris bets her reputation on a project to sell empathy in a perfume bottle. Her husband, Jim, is inspired to try a similar thing in a game he’s developing—sinking all their money into EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication. All at once, Alison’s fragrance develops dangerous effects, and Jim’s game falters in the market, then the chemist working on the perfume project vanishes. His son, David, seems to be the only one looking for him. A widower with two children, David is a man of routine who just wants to get on with his life, but his love for his father takes him into a murky world where empathy can be bought and sold and can lead to murder.

Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent – Rita considered the dead. Shut her eyes. Rolled their names around her brain. Stacked each person in order like folded laundry, warm and crisp from the sun. She wondered how her name would sound amongst them. In the rural reaches of Auckland, the women of the eclectic Gordon family gather for Christmas. They may push each other’s buttons, but know precisely when to offer tea (or a tipple). Rita, the 50-year-old baby of the family, is planning to tell them she has cancer. Drifting between past and present, she considers the lives of women in their community and reckons with what it all means for her future and her family. Featuring elderly lesbians, twins who aren’t twins, and several dogs named Roger, Hoods Landing is about shoddy pasts, ambiguous futures and the imperfect bonds that tie family together.

How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon – Mahon is sure to cause controversy with this wonderfully written, yet dangerously close to reality fiction set within the real world of the Canterbury art scene in the year of the earthquake. The story centres around a Belarus refugee who fled his country to find freedom. Sam and Gregor meet weekly to discuss art’s purpose, and critique Lukashenka from a distance, but the narrative’s pervading enemy – the corporate world – lurks beneath the surface, wickedly described in the words of Sam’s friend, architect Peter Beaven.

Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies – The alpacas are nervous. Accusations are flying about a rigged election, a mysterious illness is spreading, the Alpaca News is being censored by higher powers, and skullduggery is threatening the Breeders Showcase. Amidst a mass of self-interested parties, a forthright vet and a diplomatic engineer strive to protect the herds and restore democracy. By turns vital, farcical, heartbreaking and chilling, the much-anticipated alpaca novel by award-winning writer Duncan Sarkies is a wild and tender leap – or, more accurately, pronk – into the heart of alpaca breeding, and a snapshot of a world at a crossroads.

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey – In a sinisterly skewed version of England in 1979, thirteen-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents of a New Forest home, part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme. Each day, the boys must take medicine to protect themselves from a mysterious illness to which many of their friends have succumbed. Children who survive are allowed to move to the Big House in Margate, a destination of mythical proportions, desired by every Sycamore child. Meanwhile, in Exeter, Nancy lives a secluded life with her parents, who never let her leave the house. As the government looks to shut down the Sycamore homes and place their residents into the community, the triplets’ lives begin to intersect with Nancy’s, culminating in revelations that will rock the children to the core.

The Last Living Cannibal by Airana Ngawera – Aotearoa in the 1940s, and the Māori men of Taranaki have refused to join the Māori battalion because of the severity of their land confiscations. Koko is the oldest man in the village, a legend within his community – he’s lived through the land wars, Parihaka, imprisonment in Dunedin, and they whisper of him as the Last Living Cannibal. Koko dotes on his grandson Blackie, who has lived with him ever since Blackie’s mum left in troubling circumstances years earlier. But the ghosts of the past are bound to come calling, and when they do, they come with muru in mind.

Wonderland by Tracy Farr – Te Motu Kairangi Miramar Peninsula, Wellington 1912: Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters—seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna—have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito, fleeing scandal. She ignites the triplets’ curiosity and brings work for Matti, diverting them all from what is really happening at Wonderland. In a bold reimagining, Marie Curie—famous for her work on radioactivity—comes to Aotearoa and discovers both solace and wonder.

Nominees for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry:

Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel – Black Sugarcane is a landmark debut collection by Nafanua Purcell Kersel. Restless in form and address, these engaging and generous poems ricochet from light to dark, quiet to loud, calm to violence. We meet a loved twin sister as she dives towards the Sacred Centre, a grandmother who knows everything by heart, a shrugging office clerk, and Nafanua herself, an enigmatic shapeshifter. At the heart of Black Sugarcane is a sequence of erasure poems arising from the seminal essay ‘In Search of Tagaloa’ by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta‘isi Efi. From the worlds contained in the text, these poems rise as if inevitable. Another sequence responds to the devastating tsunami that struck between the Samoan islands of Upolu and Tutuila in September 2009. Within the line, within the word and even the letter, these poems speak to creation and translation, destruction and regeneration.

Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan – Clay Eaters traverses a network of fault lines diverging and converging at unexpected angles: a mysterious jungle island, military reconnaissance training, the spirits in the trees and abandoned temples, old family homes, the echoes across rooms, the dining table set for the archetypal feast. Here the author asks what it means to write the self, and what it is the living must carry.

E kō, nō hea koe by Matariki Bennett – a debut collection, E kō, nō hea koe is a series of goodbyes and attempts to slow the shedding, it’s a group of teenagers sparking up as they watch the great pacific garbage patch catapult into space and become a second moon, it’s endless conversations with Grandmama about stars, it is the constant rebirth of whakapapa and learning that silence isn’t the best part of her.

Giving Birth to my Father by Tusiata Avia – simply too heavy to bear. First, Tusiata Avia tells the imagined story – the one of how things should go – followed by the story of what really happens. As her father travels through his last days and into the arms of his tupu’aga, transformed, the family gathers around him with their love and raw need, and their suffering turns to storm clouds.  For Avia, his death is a beginning. Parent and child have switched places as the river carries them downstream, and she sees her father with new eyes. But this is also a time of not knowing to whom she belongs and where she will be welcome now. This is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone. 

If We Knew How We Would by Emma Barnes – If We Knew How to We Would answers a question nobody asked: How many thoughts can you work into a single poem? Through breakups and a pandemic, health issues and deaths, Emma Barnes’s second collection is a riveting, overflowing and grief-stricken reckoning with the ordinary: a skinful of spit; insides scooped out with a melon baller; cracked like an egg and nothing inside. ‘It is too much to say nothing about. It is nothing to say too much about.’

Joss: A History by Grace Yee – In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand ‘chinamen’ lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were sojourners who hailed from the Canton region in southern China, and found themselves unable to return to their homeland. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria, New South Wales, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The poems pay tribute to the author’s ancestors, illuminating how they survived – and thrived – amid longstanding colonialist stories that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first-century lens, Joss is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present.

No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg – In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at its heart a sequence of emotionally raw ‘Cremation Sonnets’. In its essence, this collection is the poet exploring ‘goodness’: ‘I am unbegrudging. I am the openest pair of arms’, she tells us. ‘I am a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.’

Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy – Sick Power Trip is Erik Kennedy’s most personal and vulnerable book yet. These are poems that tell us: the world is unwell, and sometimes writers are, too. Kennedy scrutinises the broken social contract and the dangerous actors who seem determined to dominate us, and writes with open eyes about long COVID and living wages, self-medication and sea temperatures. If it feels like we’re stuck in a post-truth moment, Kennedy reminds us that some things remain true and vital: self-care, empathy, and solidarity.

Standing on my Shadow by Serie Barford – In Standing on my Shadow an ailing Moana poet ponders her mortality while visiting the devastated yet rejuvenating Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Nuclear medicine and surgery in Aotearoa had revealed biological bombs on short fuses. Lymph nodes dancing a cancerous fandango. Serie decides to accept adjuvant therapy when she returns home. She stands on the shadow of fear and death: walking within its potentiality, recording experiences and musings, and exploring co-existing understandings of the potency of blood and body tissue within the western medical system.

Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson – Part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, part poetics, a book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as thought.

Nominees for the BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction:

Atlas of the New Zealand Wars: Volume One 1834-1864, Early Engagements to the Second Taranaki War by Derek Leask

Books of Mana: 180 Māori-Authored Books of Significance edited by Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla, and Jeanette Wikaira

Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire by Charlotte Macdonald

Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cuming Harris by Michele Leggott and Chatloer Field-Dodgson

He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers by Philip Garnock-Jones

Mark Adams: A Survey – He Kohinga Whakaahua by Sarah Farrar

Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street by Elizabeth Cox

Takoto ai te Marino: Selected Works 2018-2025 by Raukura Turei, Greta van der Star, Vanessa Green, and Katie Kerr

The Collector: Thomas Cheeseman and the Making of the Auckland Museum by Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe

Whenua edited by Felicity Milburn, Chloe Cull, and Melanie Oliver

Nominees for the General Non-Fiction Award:

50 Years of the Waitangi Tribunal: Whakamana i te Tiriti edited by Carwyn Jones

A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern

An Uncommon Land: From an Ancestral Past of Enclosure Towards a Regenerative Future by Catherine Knight

Everything But the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale by Lucy O’Hagan

Hardship and Hope: Stories of Resistance in the Fight Against Poverty in Aotearoa by Rebecca Macfie

Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa by Naomi Arnold

Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century by Steve Braunias

Ruth Dallas: A Writer’s Life by Diana Morrow

The Covid Response: A Scientist’s Account of New Zealand’s Pandemic and What Comes Next by Shaun Hendy

The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era by Peta Carey

The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project by Rosemary Baird

The Welcome of Strangers: A History of Southern Māori by Atholl Anderson

This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makareti

Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist by Mark Forman