The Ockhams 2026 finalists have been released, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the line-up. I think it is pretty safe to say that I have more books to read over the next month, as these sixteen shortlisted titles provide a great range of reading and voices to appreciate and experience. Let me remind you all of the premises and provide more information for the non-fiction titles. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to want to know who is up for the top title, but also what these captivating and hard-hitting books are about.

Shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Prize for Fiction

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. Gradually surrendering its dark secrets, The Book of Guilt is a spellbinding novel from one of our greatest storytellers: a profoundly unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others. 

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; Sam Mahon, Christchurch artist, activist, conservationist, writer, and subversive known for his sculpture of Hon Nick Smith nude and squatting over a glass of water. 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. Finally, disillusioned by the local polite tyranny, Gregor leaves.

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.

Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry

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.

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.

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.’

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.

BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction

Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire by Charlotte Macdonald; The pivotal year of 1870 brought down the curtain on the redcoat garrison world at both the metropolitan and colonial ends of the empire…In fewer than forty years, less than a lifetime, Aotearoa had gone from being a Māori world in which rangatira dominated, to a colony in which the settler state was in control of the economy, politics and people’s social destiny. Garrison World explores the lives of soldiers, sailors and their families stationed in Aotearoa, New Zealand and across the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Spanning the decades from 1840 to 1870, this major new history from Charlotte Macdonald places the New Zealand Wars within the wider framework of imperial power. It shows how conflict and resistance throughout the empire, from rebellion in India to the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, were connected to the colonial project in New Zealand. At the centre of this history are the thousands who served in the British military – from rank-and-file soldiers and bluejackets drawn from working-class Britain and Ireland, to officers from elite backgrounds who purchased their commissions. Their presence in New Zealand was vital to the imposition of imperial control, both during times of war and in the intervening years when the garrison underpinned a fragile settler economy and society. Through rich archival detail and personal accounts, Garrison World traces the structures, experiences and legacies of military occupation. Acknowledging the impact on Māori communities and whenua, the book offers a critical and unflinching account of how imperial authority was imposed – and often violently asserted. This is a compelling and significant contribution to understanding the reordering of power that shaped Aotearoa in the nineteenth century.

He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers by Philip Garnock-Jones; Aotearoa has at least 2,200 native species of flowering plants that have evolved in our unique conditions, and the vast majority of them grow nowhere else on earth. This has made New Zealand a natural laboratory for studies of flower biology and a vibrant wonderland of gardens and bush for Māori and Pākehā to enjoy. He Puāwai is a natural history of New Zealand flowers, focusing on 100 native species to represent the full range of flower phenomena of Aotearoa – from familiar iconic flowers of kōwhai, mānuka and pōhutukawa to oddities like the water-pollinated flowers of eelgrass, bat-pollinated blossoms of kiekie, and the world’s smallest flowers, Wolffia. Each flower’s text describes and explains its structure and functions, alongside over 500 remarkable photographs that enable the reader (with the viewer included in the book) to view the flowers miraculously in 3D. For gardeners and foragers, for bush walks and coffee tables, He Puāwai is an inspirational natural history of the native flowers of Aotearoa.

Mark Adams: A Survey – He Kohinga Whakaahua by Sarah Farrar; Mark Adams is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s foremost photographers. His focus on Samoan tatau, Maori-Pakeha interactions in Rotorua, carved meeting houses, locations of significance for Ngai Tahu in Te Waipounamu, and Captain James Cook’s landing sites reflect his deep engagement with our postcolonial and Pacific histories. This first-ever comprehensive survey of his work honours one of our most distinguished – and continually compelling – photographers. It includes photographs taken across the Pacific, the United Kingdom and Europe that explore the migration of artistic and cultural practices across the globe, and examine the role of museums, and photography itself, in this dynamic and ongoing cross-cultural exchange.

Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street by Elizabeth Cox; In 1891, a remarkable map of Wellington was made by surveyor Thomas Ward. It recorded the footprint of every building, from Thorndon in the north and across the teeming, inner-city slums of Te Aro to Berhampore in the south. Updated regularly over the next 10 years, it detailed hotels, theatres, oyster saloons, brothels, shops, stables, Parliament, the remnants of Māori kāinga, the Town Belt, the prisons, the ‘lunatic asylum’, the hospital and much more, in detail so particular that it went right down to the level of the street lights. Luxuriously packaged with a cloth case and fold-out jacket, Mr Ward’s Map uses this giant map and historic images to tell marvellous stories about a vital capital city, its neighbourhoods and its people at the turn of the twentieth century. 

General Non-Fiction Award

Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa by Naomi Arnold; Award-winning journalist Naomi Arnold spends nearly nine months walking the length of New Zealand on Te Araroa, fulfilling a 20-year dream. On her own, she traverses mountains, rivers, cities and plains from summer to spring, walking on through days of thick mud, blazing sun and lightning storms, and into cold, starlit nights. Along the way, she encounters colourful locals and travellers who delight and inspire her. An upbeat, fascinating and inspiring memoir of solitude, love and friendship, and the joys and pains to be found in the wilderness.

A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern; From the former prime minister of New Zealand, then the world’s youngest female head of government and just the second to give birth in office, comes a deeply personal memoir chronicling her extraordinary rise and offering inspiration to a new generation of leaders. What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remarkable story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be. When Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister at age thirty-seven, the world took notice. But it was her compassionate yet powerful response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, resulting in swift and sweeping gun control laws, that demonstrated her remarkable leadership. She guided her country through unprecedented challenges—a volcanic eruption, a major biosecurity incursion, and a global pandemic—while advancing visionary new polices to address climate change, reduce child poverty, and secure historic international trade deals. She did all this while juggling first-time motherhood in the public eye. Ardern exemplifies a new kind of leadership—proving that leaders can be caring, empathetic, and effective. She has become a global icon, and now she is ready to share her story, from the struggles to the surprises, including for the first time the full details of her decision to step down during her sixth year as Prime Minister. Through her personal experiences and reflections, Jacinda is a model for anyone who has ever doubted themselves or has aspired to lead with compassion, conviction, and courage. A Different Kind of Power is more than a political memoir; it’s an insight into how it feels to lead, ultimately asking: What if you, too, are capable of more than you ever imagined?

The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era by Peta Carey; ‘The Hollows Boys’ is the story of the helicopter deer recovery era in Fiordland, told through the lives of three brothers, Gary, Mark and Kim Hollows. There is the usual daredevil ‘boy’s own adventure’ side of the story. There is extreme competition between pilots and huge sums of money at stake. But there is also the strange phenomenon of luck, the roll of the dice, the gamble on survival. Ultimately, there is the overwhelming cost – not simply wrecked machines and insurance bills, but the loss of a brother, a friend, a father or a son. And there is the legacy from that loss that many continue to endure. ‘The Hollows Boys’ is the real story of an extraordinary era in New Zealand history that will never be repeated, told with honesty and courage, against the magnificent backdrop of Fiordland National Park.

This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makareti; It’s not beautiful, not at all, when it’s there in front of you, but writing transforms. In her first book of nonfiction, prizewinning author Tina Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and into a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment. Makereti stands at the foot of her mounga and pays careful attention to tohu. With her tūpuna at her elbow, she casts around for home, meets taonga in museums, and writes her way towards her father. She walks through the darkness with others, in awe of Te Kore, Te Pō and Te Ao Mārama—a universe of potential being, dark and light. These are some of the kaupapa that underpin her work and her way of moving through the world, both enlivened and haunted by a compulsion to write. Included here are frank and moving essays about the wāhine who have shown her many ways of being a Māori woman, the pain and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism. What if we could transform the events that made us who we are? What if there were a way back to the beginning? By turns lyrical, personal and critical, This Compulsion In Us is many things all at once, and an unforgettable portrait of one of Aotearoa’s foremost storytellers.