Catherine Chidgey, Ashleigh Young and Hera Lindsay Bird are 2017 Book Awards winners
The Creative Writing graduates took out this year's Fiction, General Non-Fiction and Best First Book (Poetry) Prizes.
Three graduates of Victoria's Master of Arts in Creative Writing are among the winners of the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. And Victoria University Press had another strong showing, as publisher of four of the winning books.
The Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize - at $50,000, country's richest prize for fiction - was awarded to Catherine Chidgey (MA in Creative Writing, 1997) for her fourth novel The Wish Child (VUP) .
Ashleigh Young's debut essay collection Can You Tolerate This? (VUP) won The Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction, following it's international recognition via a Yale University Windham-Campbell Prize earlier this year. Ashleigh completed the MA in Creative Writing in 2009 and has jointly convened a Creative Science Writing Workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
2011 graduate Hera Lindsay Bird won The Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry for Hera Lindsay Bird (VUP).
All three are former winners of Victoria's Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing, which is awarded annually to the author of the best page-based portfolio in the MA in Creative Writing programme.
Other VUP authors on the Book Awards winners' list were Andrew Johnston, who won the overal Poetry prize for his sixth collection Fits and Starts, and Adam Dudding, who won The E.H. McCormick Best First Book Award for General Non-Fiction for My Father's Island: A Memoir)
Read the full winners' list.