Abstract
Introduction
After the anxieties of 2015, 2016 was a year of consolidation for New Zealand literature, with quality publications by several high-profile writers, exciting works by emerging authors, and a considerable body of critical scholarship being published. The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards honouring work published in 2016 were held in May 2017. The Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize went to Catherine Chidgey’s The Wish Child, a haunting interrogation of loss set against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Chidgey achieves a controlled balance between her insights into the vast, frightening propaganda machine of the Third Reich and the sympathetic connection she evokes for her characters. The dialogues between Frau Miller and Frau Muller showcase Chidgey’s sly humour, while the distant, otherworldly narrator (whose identity is kept hidden until near the end) speaks in poetic prose. The narrator acts as a tragic witness, at once personal and particular, but also the voice of a wider lament at the way in which humans seek to justify hate and rationalize their own grotesque cruelty. Yet, as with Chidgey’s previous work, there is also an emphasis on the possibility of hope and transformation: “I am the wish child, the future cast in water. I am the thrown coin, the blown candle; I am the fallen star.”
The other fiction finalists included Emma Neale’s Billy Bird, which focuses on a grieving family. Eight-year-old Billy is a powerful, unsentimentalized presence; lonely and idiosyncratic, he finds solace in birds, feeling their “song in his body the way you feel good dreams still in your blood as you wake up”. Owen Marshall’s understated Love as a Stranger explores the intensities and needs of late-middle-aged love and the perpetual human grappling with mortality. The fourth fiction finalist — C. K. Stead’s short story collection, The Name on the Door Is Not Mine — combines previously published work with new stories, including “Last Season’s Man”, which won the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Many of the characters are writers or academics, searching for love and meaning, and the stories are rich in allusions. As the narrator of “Determined Things to Destiny” explains, it is as if experience is conjured “into existence as illustrations of famous books and poems, rather than the other way about”.
The winner of the Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction went to Gina Cole for Black Ice Matters. The 13 stories revolve around the multiple layers of heat and cold: literal, metaphorical, and psychological. In an interview, Cole recounts that she “didn’t want to be political” in her writing, but just “a Fijian, lesbian woman who writes”. But she gradually realized that she could not “avoid being political” (Scoop, 15 September).
Another acclaimed collection of short stories was Tracey Slaughter’s deleted scenes for lovers. Charlotte Graham hailed the collection as “a stunning, feral, gut-punch of a book […] it depicts a real New Zealand, an ignored and untold one […] white, working-class, bogan”. Meditating on the title, Graham writes that “these stories are really about what’s been deleted”; “the drag of the hidden past being drawn up into the light”; “rape, cancer, aging, suicide, love, hope” (New Zealand Books 3[115] p3).
2016 marked the passing of novelist and critic Sir James McNeish. In both his fiction and his social commentary he critiqued the conventionality and bigotry of New Zealand society, while at the same time profiling exceptional individuals and rebels, such as the athlete in Lovelock (1986), the colonial outlaw James Mackenzie in The Mackenzie Affair (1972), and five New Zealanders at Oxford in the 1930s in Dance of the Peacocks (2003). McNeish’s 2016 Seelenbider: The Olympian Who Defied Hitler is a characteristic blend of fact and fiction with McNeish filling in the gaps in the historical record; “Like Scheherazade, I am having to invent”. Paula Morris writes that with the death of “this accomplished New Zealand writer, our last modernist, we have lost a singular voice, a natural storyteller, a cultural critic, whose provocation to us all is to break ranks, as we challenge established authority and conventional wisdom” (New Zealand Books 27[1] p7).
Mike Doyle, poet and literary critic, also passed away in 2016. An Irishman who was born in Birmingham, Doyle lived and worked for much of his life in Canada, but taught at the University of Auckland in the 1960s and published studies of New Zealand poets R. A. K. Mason (1970) and James K. Baxter (1976). As the editor of Recent Poetry in New Zealand (1965), Doyle provided a counter-view of New Zealand poetry to that of Allen Curnow, who had edited collections of national poetry in 1945, 1951, and 1960. Doyle’s poetry collections, A Splinter of Glass: Poems 1951–55 (1956), Stonedancer (1976), and A Steady Hand (1983) were published in New Zealand.
Two important collections of poetry by poets no longer with us were published this year. The first complete edition of Katherine Mansfield’s poetry includes 26 poems dating from 1909–1910 that were discovered by Gerri Kimber in Newberry Library, Chicago. A collection of Karl Wolfskehl’s poems, edited by Friedrich Voit and translated by Andrew Paul Wood, is particularly important in that it provides both the German originals and Wood’s superb translations into English. A German-Jewish refugee, Wolfskehl spent the last decade of his life in Auckland and this collection places the poems of the 1940s within his wider body of innovative creation.
The winner of the 2016 Poetry Award was Andrew Johnson, for his collection Fits and Starts. It is rich in allusions to classical mythology, the King James Bible, the radio alphabet, and ancestry.com. Johnson ranges into the past and into the psyche of the poet, but also tackles topical issues, as in “Afghanistan”. Inventive, richly metaphoric, and succinct, most of the poems are ten lines, and Johnson is not afraid to use humour to underscore his message. “Golf” uses the game as a symbol for life’s repetitions: Before you know it you’re back where you started — by the racecourse, by the camping ground, where the small polluted stream misremembers its name. You’re out there with your family tree, your sandwiches, the receipt for your fee, and then before you know it you’re back where you started.
The Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry went to Hera Lindsay Bird. Her eponymous debut collection is filled with inventive, risky poetry that embraces awkward and embarrassing emotions and situations. The collection sold out in 24 hours, with “Monica” going viral. Poetry and the self lie at the heart of the collection: I want to write poems all day I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep, Write poems in my sleep Make my dreams poems Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes.
The other finalists for the Poetry Award speak of the journeys and cultures that intertwine in both New Zealand’s past and her present. Tusiata Avia’s Fale Aitu / Spriit House shifts between geographies and cultures, Samoa to Christchurch, Gaza to New York, constantly destabilizing the reader through making the familiar strange and the strange comfortingly but also uncannily “normal”. Gregory Khan’s This Paper Boat is built round vignettes of life-narratives, in particular those of novelist Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson), yet this core strand intersects with the evocation of various Chinese ghosts.
As usual, only a few play collections were published in 2016. Ken Duncum and Rebecca Rodden’s BATS Plays provides access to six plays written and performed at BATS Theatre in Wellington and plays by Alison Quigan, Vivienne Plumb, and Lynda Chanwai-Earle appear in Shift. Several playwrights are the focal point of literary scholarship; both contemporary dramatists such as Hone Kouka and Briar Grace-Smith, and twentieth-century playwrights such as Bruce Mason and Stella Jones.
Ashleigh Young’s collection of personal essays, Can You Tolerate This?, received the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction. Young is a blogger and the 21 essays share the intimacy and conversational tone of the blog, documenting Young’s personal struggles, such as growing up in small town New Zealand, battling with eating disorders, and coming to terms with the female body. Many of the essays reflect on family relationships, particularly with siblings. Family is likewise central to My Father’s Island, which won the E. H. McCormick Best First Book Award for General Non-Fiction. Adam Dudding attempts to tease out the inner life of his father Robin Dudding, the acclaimed editor of Landfall and Islands. Cilla McQueen In a Slant Light, a memoir written as poetry fragments, provides vignettes of her life as a child and young woman. The flickering glimpses of moments and people — such as partner Ralph Hotere, and authors James K. Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Bill Manhire, and Fleur Adcock — reflect the vivid but transitory and partial nature of memory.
2016 was a significant and prolific year of literary criticism. Mark Williams edited a collection of essays about the History of New Zealand Literature which traces the genealogy of New Zealand literature from its first imaginings by Europeans in the eighteenth century to contemporary debates about writing schools. A range of writers are profiled, including Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. The World Novel in English to 1950, edited by Ralph Crane, Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, focuses on the period up to 1950 and explores both specific New Zealand themes and authors (in particular Robin Hyde) and the intersections and divergences between New Zealand, Australian, Pacific, African, Asian, Caribbean, and Canadian writing. The inclusion of a number of essays on sub-genres of the novel, such as the colonial romance, the colonial Gothic, and colonial utopias and dystopias, allows for rich comparisons to be drawn, and the chapter on the novel in Antarctica is particularly fascinating. Jennifer Lawn’s Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008 explores more recent New Zealand writing, teasing out the interconnectedness of economics, political ideologies and cultural capital. Lawn profiles both well-recognized authors, such as Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Eleanor Catton, and Maurice Gee, but also reflects on a range of other significant contemporary voices, such as Damien Wilkes, Charlotte Grimshaw, Paula Morris, and Alice Tawhai. Much-needed analysis of contemporary voices, such as Avia Tisiata, Kirsty Gunn, and Sia Figiel, is likewise to be found in a range of articles and chapters.