The Ockham NZ Book Awards’ Longlist Is Out!
It feels weird to say this when it still feels very much like 2016, but the Ockham NZ Book Awards’ longlist for 2017 has just come out.
When I saw the list I did a wee Snoopy dance because my friend Frankie McMillan’s My Mother and The Hungarians is on it!
Frankie and HUNGARIANS are in the hunt for the Ockham Award for fiction; they’re in pretty fine company, too, including Love As A Stranger by Owen Marshall (who was my mentor in the NZ Society of Authors Mentorship Programme in 2005. )
One interesting thing about My Mother and The Hungarians is that it’s a collection of flash fiction (I think that’s 500 words or less — very short stories indeed, at any rate) so it will be interesting to see how it fares against the novel-length works.
Personally, I think it has a very good chance of making the short list so now I shall just have to wait and see whether the judges agree, a wait I suspect will be far less nerve-wracking for me than for all the longlisted authors!
I featured an excerpt from My Mother and the Hungarians here on August 23. To read it, click on:
The house on Holloway Street