We start NZLive.com’s sweeping coverage of the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards with a look at the Fiction category. The purpose of this category is to recognise literary excellence in works of published fiction and drama.

The winning book will, in the opinion of the judges, be a significant addition to the literature of New Zealand. Past winners in this category include Lloyd Jones for Mister Pip, Patricia Grace for Tu, Elizabeth Knox for The Vintners’ Luck and Craig Marriner for Stonedogs.

In a strange twist, the all-female finalist line-up for 2008 is a direct reversal of last year’s all-male showing.

Controversy has arisen over the fact only four books were short-listed this year, instead of the usual five. You can read more about this here, here, and here.

Let’s take a look at this year’s Fiction finalists. And don’t forget to enter the giveaway for a copy of one of the books on NZLive.com.

The Blue by Mary McCallum (Penguin Group (NZ))

Mary McCallum was born in Zambia, and has lived in New Zealand since she was four. She has worked as a broadcasting journalist in New Zealand and Europe, and continues to work as a freelance writer and reviewer. The Blue is Mary’s first novel. It won her the NZ Society of Author’s Lilian Ida Smith Award 2003/4 and an MA with distinction at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Married to Ian, Mary spends much of her time raising three children in their house by the sea and writing her second novel.

Lilian lives in an isolated island community at the mouth of Tory Channel trying to make the best of a life that has at its core a secret grief. It is 1938 and for three months of every year the men take to the sea to hunt whales with fast boats and explosive harpoons. This year, the whales aren’t the only ones returning – Lilian’s troubled son Mickey has come home too. In this rugged, unsettled world, things are not always what they seem.

Buy Mary McCallum’s The Blue at Fishpond
Read a review of The Blue from NZ Herald
Read a review of The Blue from NZ Listener

An interview with Mary McCallum from Penguin Books
Mary is a prolific blogger. Take a look at her blog, or her contribution to NZ Book Month, and her musings at LeafSalon.

Edwin & Matilda by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin Group (NZ))

Laurence Fearnley is the author of six novels. Her second novel, Room, was shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2001. She has been awarded several fellowships, notably the 2004 Artists to Antarctica fellowship, the 2006 Island of Residencies fellowship in Tasmania, and the 2007 Robert Burns fellowship at the University of Otago.

Based in Dunedin, she is currently working on the third book in her southern trilogy.

This beautifully written new novel is about finding love in the most unlikely of places. Set in the southern South Island, it describes the unusual bond formed between 62-year-old photographer Edwin and 22-year-old Matilda, as their relationship grows in ways neither could possibly have predicted.

Buy Laurence Fearnley’s Edwin & Matilda at Fishpond
Read a review of Edwin & Matilda from NZ Listener
Read a review of Edwin & Matilda by Bookman Beattie

Learn more about Laurence Fearnley at the NZ Book Council
Read more work by Laurence at the NZ Electronic Text Centre

Luminous by Alice Tawhai (Huia Publishers)

Alice Tawhai’s first book, Festival of Miracles, was named by the judges of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2006 as one of three deserving candidates for the Best First Book Award for Fiction.

Of Tainui and Ngā Puhi descent, Alice Tawhai was inspired to start writing when she read Keri Hulme’s The Bone People as a teenager. Festival of Miracles has been translated into French and was promoted at the Paris Book Fair in 2006. She prefers anonymity and thinks that her inspirations, her characters she writes about, deserve any accolades she receives.

Luminous is her second collection, and it is complex and bittersweet. It combines characters and occurrences that are at once cripplingly dark yet tinged with a quiet beauty and optimism. Tawhai deftly covers subjects such as love, identity, devotion and abandonment.

Buy Alice Tawhai’s Luminous at Fishpond
Read a review of Luminous from NZ Listener

Information about Alice Tawhai by Huia Publishers

Opportunity by Charlotte Grimshaw (Random House NZ)

In addition to this short story collection, Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of three critically acclaimed novels (Provocation, Guilt, and Foreign City). She has been named by the New Zealand Listener as one of the ten best New Zealand writers under forty. In 2000 she was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for literature. She has been a double finalist and prizewinner in the Sunday Star-Times Short Story competition, and in 2006 she won the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield award for short fiction. She regularly contributes as a fiction reviewer to the New Zealand Listener, and she lives in Auckland.

Opportunity brings together stories that can be read separately, but together make a unified whole. A man confronts death after an operation, a devout Christian encounters a man who hurt her long ago, a secretary uncovers her boss’s secret shame. And in a house in Auckland an elderly woman is writing the last book of her life, one which, she says, contains all of her crimes. Opportunity is a book about storytelling, about generosity and opportunism; above all it is a celebration of the subtleties of human impulses, of what Katherine Mansfield called the LIFE of life.

Buy Charlotte Grimshaw’s Opportunity at Womens Bookshop
Read a review of Opportunity from NZ Listener
Read a review of Opportunity at The Lumiere Reader

Read Charlotte’s blog for NZ Book Month
Learn more about Charlote Grimshaw at the NZ Book Council

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under Culture online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.