Airini Beautrais wins New Zealand’s Ockham fiction prize for short story collection Bug Week

A collection of short stories has won the top prize at the Ockham New Zealand book awards – only the second time a collection has won the fiction prize in the awards’ history, and the first time in over a decade.

Airini Beautrais won the NZ$57,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction for her collection, Bug Week & Other Stories. Beautrais has published several books of poetry, but Bug Week is her first work of fiction. She was nominated alongside two previous winners of the award – Catherine Chidgey and Pip Adam – as well as a past nominee, Brannavan Gnanalingam.

Speaking to the Guardian earlier this year, Beautrais said the collection of “unhappy love stories” had been 10 years in the making. She was inspired, she said, by “the female experience, from girlhood through to middle age and end of life.”

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“I was writing from that interest in stories of women, and all the good and bad that comes with that.”

In the poetry category, Tusiata Avia was the first Pasifika woman ever to win the Mary and Peter Biggs award for poetry, for her collection The Savage Coloniser Book.

“The violence of shared and fractured histories surfaces throughout the collection like liquefaction, unsettling, displacing, disrupting,” poetry judges convener Dr Briar Wood said.

The fiction award is New Zealand’s largest book cash prize and is often a windfall for local writers. Beautrais supports her writing with full-time work as a science teacher. “There have been times in my life where I have worked part-time … and I’ve been able to write – and times when I haven’t,” she said in March. “It’s always been a bit of a juggle.”

International guest judge for the fiction category was Tommy Orange, author of the acclaimed, Pulitzer-nominated debut novel There There. “I was consistently surprised by sentences, the beauty and singular language,” Orange said. “If the book were a bug, it would be a big one, with teeth and venom, with wings and a surprising heart, possibly several, beating on every page with life.”

“Casting a devastating and witty eye on humanity at its most fallible and wonky, this is a tightly-wound and remarkably assured collection,” said the fiction category’s convener of judges, Kiran Dass.

Vincent O’Sullivan won the general nonfiction award for his work, The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere, A Biographical Portrait. The judges called it “a sensitive, detailed portrait of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most important modern artists”.

Other winners on the night included:

• The Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand award for illustrated nonfiction: Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine, by Monique Fiso

• Te Mūrau o te Tuhi, a Māori language award: to Mātāmua ko te Kupu!, by Tā Tīmoti Kāretu

• The Hubert Church prize for a best first book of fiction: Victory Park by Rachel Kerr

• The E H McCormick prize for a best first work of general nonfiction: Specimen: Personal Essays by Madison Hamill

• The Jessie Mackay prize for a best first book of poetry: I Am a Human Being by Jackson Nieuwland

• The Judith Binney prize for a best first work of illustrated nonfiction: Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine by Monique Fiso