Creative Writing graduates win NZ Post Book Awards Best First Books
Amy Head and Marty Smith have won the Best First Book categories for Fiction and Poetry
MA in Creative Writing graduates and first-time authors Amy Head and Marty Smith have won the New Zealand Society of Authors Best First Book Awards for fiction and poetry respectively in the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards.
Both books were published by Victoria University Press, which has a total of five books on this year's shortlist.
Amy Head's Tough(VUP 2013) is a collection of stories set on the West Coast, past and present. Tough was included in the NZ Listener and Metro best book lists for 2013.
'...vividly brought to life and full of imaginative flourishes of minutely observed language.' - Guy Somerset, NZ Listener
'Head uses understatement to marvellous effect; Tough is tenderness by other means.' - Murray Bramwell, NZ Books
Announcing Tough as the winner of the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for fiction, the judges described Amy's writing as clean and unfettered, yet fulsomely expressed. Judging panel convenor, the broadcaster Miriama Kamo says the book explores the 'then and now in a literary panorama mirroring the very place upon which the collection is built.'
Marty Smith's Horse with Hat (VUP 2014), has not only won the NZSA Jessie Mackay First Book Award for poetry, but is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards overall Poetry category, in the company of current and past New Zealand Poets Laureate Vincent O'Sullivan and Michele Leggott, and fellow first-time author and VUP poet Caoilinn Hughes.
'This is a simply beautiful book. Marty Smith’s poems are by turns quirky, sad, punchy, amusing, thought-provoking, and above all they provide a sense of time and place and family' - Booksellers New Zealand
'...you travel through sumptuous lines and layers. This is no rose-tinted memoir—you get grit and you get open views, you get life’s awkwardness and you get empathy...a fine debut.' The Poetry Shelf
Of Marty's debut, Miriama Kamo commented: 'If Kiwi filmaking can be characterised as "cinema of unease", then Horse with Hat is the literary equivalent – dark, quiet, explosive and compelling. The book reflects thos quintessential markers that so many New Zealand families will recognise, whether with joy or reluctance. Galloping from poem to poem, Marty's work is an innovative and unsentimental observation of relationsahips, the most primal of all – within the family.'