All 16 book covers for the 2025 Ockhams book awards shortlist.

All the finalists in this year’s Ockham NZ Book Awards (Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksMarch 5, 2025

What the judges picked: the 2025 Ockham Book Awards shortlist, revealed

Books editor

All the finalists in this year’s Ockham NZ Book Awards (Design: Tina Tiller)

Which books made the final 16? With commentary by books editor Claire Mabey.

From 175, to 43, to the final 16. Publishing is brutal. Awards are a necessary and propulsive part of the industry: recognising excellence and giving the market a boost. This is the stage of the awards cycle where I start to imagine the backroom argy-bargy: circles of judges sucking on cigars, slinging quips, slurping on whiskeys late into the night as they haggle and argue the merits and flaws of each title while clouds of acrid smoke fill a windowless room. Maybe someone starts muttering insults, maybe another storms off, leaving their counterparts glancing at their wristwatches before dropping their heads into their hands wondering how they’ll ever come to a consensus.

But they did. And as the sun rises so too does the results of their deliberations.

Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction ($65,000 prize)

At the Grand Glacier Hotel by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, Penguin Random House)
Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn (Otago University Press)
The Mires by Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) (Ultimo Press)

Thoughts: This is not the shortlist I was expecting. But at the same time I’m neither surprised nor disappointed, much. I’m bummed that Ash by Louise Wallace didn’t make the cut. It’s a terrific, inventive, truthful, biting book: rare, short and refined. I’m also surprised that Amma by Saraid de Silva didn’t make it: widely championed, loved by readers, with rich, revelatory characters. De Silva can be consoled by the fact that Amma was just announced on the longlist for the Women’s Prize alongside Miranda July, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elizabeth Strout and Kaliane Bradley among others – a major achievement.

What we have here are four senior and award-winning authors: Laurence Fearnley won the fiction prize in 2011 for The Hut Builder; Kirsty Gunn won the book of the year in 2013 for her novel The Big Music; Damien Wilkins won the fiction award for The Miserables in 1994; and Tina Makereti won the 2016 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize.

Laurence Fearnley is a reliably excellent novelist: she is a master at evoking the ways bodies and minds exist in specific environments. At the Grand Glacier Hotel is the third novel in her project of writing a novel for each of the five senses. This one, according to Fearnley, aligns with sound. However for me it wasn’t the noise of the novel (set in a remote hotel surrounded by bush) as much as the physicality of the main character who is recovering from major surgery to remove a cancer. The images that linger are of a woman learning to move a changed body in the world: from taking a bath, to encountering strangers, to bush bashing. In many ways it’s a quiet novel, unsettling even as it heals. The shortlising will, I hope, turn more people onto Fearnley’s work and her extensive backlist of novels set in the wilds of Aotearoa.

Delirious by Damien Wilkins is the one I’m picking for the win. Wilkins draws such detail, from the mundane to the extraordinary, from his characters that it’s hard to believe it’s fiction. That’s what you want in a novel: to be fully absorbed into another world and invested in the comedies and tragedies of other lives. Gabi Lardies and I discussed Delirious and both concluded it is superb.

Otago University Press’s decision to launch a series of short story collections has paid off with Kirsty Gunn’s Pretty Ugly. Gunn (who lives in Scotland and is a professor of creative writing in Dundee) is widely known for her heartbreaking short novel, Rain (1994); and The Big Music (2012). She is an award-winning short story writer and is known for a style that tests the reader, that is interested in the line between fictional and the real, and plays with ideas of artifice and arrangement. The short story is notoriously difficult to do well. Airini Beautrais won the fiction prize in 2021 for her collection Bug Week. Maybe we’ll see the form rise to the top once again.

Tina Makereti is a masterful writer. I’m always at ease in her prose and provoked by the ideas in her work. The Mires is a novel for our times: it’s about mindsets, how people are pitted against people thanks to how they are steered to think and why. Holding the fragile web of relationships is the land underneath, the waters, that in this time of climate crisis present a vast tension and a mighty force.

Four books by experienced, award-winning writers. International judge Georgina Godwin has been enlisted to offer an external eye and help our local judges pluck out a winner. Godwin is books editor for Monocle Radio and the host of the flagship literary show Meet the Writers, and current affairs programme The Globalist. She has previously judged the Bailie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, The Caine Prize for African Writing and the British Book Awards.

Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry ($12,000 prize)

Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka by Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu) (Auckland University Press)
In the Half Light of a Dying Day by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press)
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit by Emma Neale (Otago University Press)
Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer (Spoor Books)

Thoughts: “True poets know that institutional gratification is ultimately meaningless, and true success can only be found in the withholding gaze of the distant and unforgiving moon,” said Hera Lindsay Bird, The Spinoff’s poetry editor, in her commentary on the longlist. Nevertheless we have four collections from four writers and three publishers (Auckland University Press continuing a long list of excellent poetry publishing) from which to pick one to crown as poetry ruler of the year.

I loved Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer, published by new indie press Spoor Books, who promise great things for our local scene. Emma Neale is a poet who can wield that kind of mind-bending magic that only the best poets seem to have access to. Stead of course is no stranger to winning awards: he’s won the poetry prize in its various iterations twice before, and scooped other awards alongside. Robert Sullivan is also celebrated poet with shortlistings and wins accompanying severals of his works.

Poetry is surely one of the most subjective forms to appraise. Convener of judges for the poetry prize, David Eggleton, intimated that it was a hell of a time choosing the final four: “We sought to argue, debate and rationalise — and eventually harmonise — our choices; pitting militant language poets against equally militant identity poets, spiritual poets, polemical poets, experimental poets and careful traditionalists in pursuit of acknowledging books of literary excellence at the highest level.”

The top four here are all winners to me but for the institutional crown I’ll stick my pin in Slender Volumes.

Bookhub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction ($12,000 prize)

Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist by Jill Trevelyan, Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson (Massey University Press)
Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press)
Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa by Matiu Baker (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Whakaue), Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice (Te Papa Press)
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art by Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) and Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī) (Auckland University Press)

Thoughts: First, a note on BookHub. It’s a website that pulls together indie bookshops from all over the country. You go there, you type in the book you’re after, you buy it from the shop that has it. BookHub means you get to interact with booksellers all over Aotearoa – I use it all the time and love how each bookshop has a different manner: some send notes of gratitude with your shopping, others send emails saying how excited they are for you to read what you’ve ordered, there can be postcards and lovely, scented wrapping.

Second, this list of finalists includes four senior curators at Te Papa as history and art dominates the shortlist: Athol McCredie (Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer); and Matiu Baker, Katie Cooper, Rebecca Rice and museum research associate Michael Fitgerald (Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa). So sweet when your job includes book writing and publishing.

Jill Trevelyan won this prize in 2009 for her outstanding biography of Rita Angus. The book she’s back again for (with co-authors Jennifer Taylor and Greg Donson), Edith Collier: Early New Zealand Modernist, is a revelation: there are 150 colour reproductions of Collier’s paintings and multiple contributors responding to them. Collier was ahead of her time, a student of Frances Hodgkins, a painter from Whanganui finally finding acclaim through this publication and its accompanying exhibition at the newly reopened Sarjeant gallery. Big book, important book, has award-winning written all over it.

Academics and authors Deirdre Brown, Ngarino Ellis and the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki wrote about how they approached the epic Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art for The Spinoff last year. It’s a huge publication in both scale and significance, no doubt transforming future studies of art history in Aotearoa and the world. It’s the book to beat though I’ll always have a soft spot for Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer and its mesmerising, haunting black and whites.

General Non-Fiction Award ($12,000 prize)

Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press)*
Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) (HarperCollins Publishers Aotearoa New Zealand)
The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka University Press)*
The Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation by Richard Shaw (Massey University Press)

Thoughts: Herewith are four books of creative non-fiction! There’s no muddling of genre here in this category where the highly academic can mingle with the determinedly personal. Authorial voice powers these four, brilliant books: from Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku’s powerhouse memoir, to unique debut essay collections from Flora Feltham and Una Cruickshank, to Richard Shaw‘s valuable work dispelling settler mythologies.

Genuinely no clue which book will win out. I’ve read them all and loved them all for very different reasons. Richard Shaw’s work, I think, is essential for Pākehā in such times as we are in (and I’ve seen first hand how important for Māori, too). Flora Feltham does that thing where the hard and the soft come together in one perfectly formed piece of observation and probing: the essays are affecting, curious, wide-ranging. Cruickshank has offered our bookshelves something entirely unique – a glittering necklace of gems to turn over one by one. But I think the award will go to te Awekōtuku’s autobiography (reviewed in rapturous terms on The Spinoff by Matariki Williams). Autobiography is hard to write well – to convey the origins and the underneath – and te Awekōtuku not only has the material to weave, but the style.

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Alice Neville
— Deputy editor

Kudos to the judges:

Thom Conroy (convenor); bookshop owner and reviewer Carole Beu; and author, educator and writing mentor Tania Roxborogh (Ngāti Porou) (Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction); poet, critic and writer David Eggleton (convenor); poet, novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Smither MNZM; and writer and editor Jordan Tricklebank (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Mahuta) (Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry); former Alexander Turnbull chief librarian and author Chris Szekely (convenor); arts advocate Jessica Palalagi; and historian and social history curator Kirstie Ross (BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction); author, writer and facilitator Holly Walker (convenor); author, editor and historical researcher Ross Calman (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāi Tahu); and communications professional, writer and editor Gilbert Wong (General Non-Fiction Award).

All of the above books can be ordered through Unity Books. The winners (including winners of the best first book awards) will be announced at a public event at Auckland Writers Festival on May 14.

Keep going!

Pictures of book covers with a background of books and cats.

Bookshops, cat shops and coffee: examples of ‘healing’ books that are selling in their millions.

BooksMarch 1, 2025

The rise of the ‘healing’ novel and our sad need to cry

Claire Mabey

Books editor

Bookshops, cat shops and coffee: examples of ‘healing’ books that are selling in their millions.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi opened the floodgates to a wave of cosy, melancholic Japanese and Korean fiction in translation. But what’s behind the popularity of these little books designed to give us big feelings?

@Grapiedeltaco can hardly speak through her tears. “Why would someone be crying over this book, bitch? I’m sad!” @sivanreads has mascara running down her face. “This book is not sad,” she sniffs. “And yet I feel the most insane, crippling sense of sadness in my chest that I don’t think will ever go away.” @Bootique2 is so distraught she struggles to squeeze the words out. “I didn’t finish the book. I can’t stop crying … Oh my god my eyes hurt! They deserved better… you guys were lying. My eyes burn!”

BookTok and GoodReads are strewn with the aftermath of Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, first published in Japanese in 2015, and published in English in 2019 (translated by George Trousselot). The novel is nowhere near universally beloved (Sam Brooks published a lukewarm review on The Spinoff; and there are plenty of unimpressed responses between the exuberant five-star reviews on Good Reads; “so sickeningly sentimental, it’s almost unbearable” said Sam Quixote) but in the publishing trade it’s a bone fide smash hit.

Watch on TikTok

Kawaguchi’s bestseller is set in a quaint back-alley cafe in Tokyo called Funinculi Funincula (more on that later) that bends the rules of space and time by allowing customers to visit the past, so long as they’re back before their magical coffee gets cold (an hour-ish). Encounters are ridden with loss, ennui and an opportunity to grapple with the idea that as much as we might want it to, the present can’t be changed by busting in on the past. There are four more books in the series – the latest one, Before We Forget Kindness, was published in 2024. Kawaguchi’s books have sold over six million copies and have been translated into over 40 languages.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold has regularly surfaced in the Unity Books Bestseller charts, published by The Spinoff, every year since 2019 (and didn’t leave the top ten for months in that year). In 2024, Kawaguchi appeared at the Auckland Writers Festival and spoke with journalist Maggie Tweedie, who observed that the Auckland audience seemed to strongly connect to his “ability to connect with grief; gently accept loss and move forward.” Melanie Taylor, who was Kawaguchi’s interpreter for the event, sat at the book signing table with him afterwards. It was so long that the queue stretched out the door and he was kept signing books for two hours. The people who came to the signing queue ranged in age, from early teens to seniors. “There were only two Japanese people,” said Taylor. “Many had read all of his books and were eagerly awaiting the next. Some shared [his books] helped them process losses and regrets.”

In Kawaguchi’s wake has marched a procession of similar novels: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, Welcome To The Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Korean writer Huang Bo-Reum, and the latest (published last week), We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Siyu Ashida (one of many whimsical cat-related bestselling Japanese novels).

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Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

Mandy from Bookety Book Books confirms that for her bookshop, too, there’s been a marked increase in sales of this realm of heartstring-tugging translated fiction. “Before the Coffee Gets Cold was sitting on my bestseller chart towards the end of last year [2024] and we don’t always see backlist titles out performing new releases,” she says.

Each of the above titles was also a bestseller in Japan (or in Bo Reum’s case, Korea) before it was translated for an English-reading market. And each one features the hallmarks of what the publishing industry is calling “cosy” or “healing” fiction: quaint, bijou settings filled with books, cats and steaming mugs of time-travel coffee. The novels are written in an accessible style, are relatively short, and are designed to draw readers into a romanticised, domestic-adjacent world and take them far from the stresses of commuting, work, the encroaching mindfuck of AI, far right political agendas, genocides, billionaires, environmental catastrophe, and job losses. The emotionally loaded storylines often swerve hard into the sentimental and extract, at times, extreme emotional responses.

It’s far from uncommon in times of stress for people to turn to escapist art. The portal of story for relaxation has existed for as long as we have. But this particular moment of “healing” fiction – complete with snot and tear-soaked video responses that amass vast viewer numbers – suggests that readers around the world are not just in search of escape, but also catharsis. Japanese and Korean “healing” books are servicing a global demand for art that facilitates an almighty cry.

One origin for the melancholic tone of these novels can be found in Japanese literary criticism, in a concept called “mono no aware”, which roughly translates to “the pathos of things”, or feeling deeply about a thing. The idea is applied to art that is acutely aware of the poignancy of time passing, the impermanent state of life, of experience, of the senses. That everything is fleeting, and inherent in those moments is beauty as well as pain. It’s this undulation of feeling that underpins Before the Coffee Gets Cold and its specific peddling of tearjerking encounters.

But the closer you look, the more you can see shades of “mono no aware” in literature everywhere. The name of the cafe at the heart of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Funiculi Funicula, references a song written by Luigi Denza with lyrics by Peppino Turce in 1880 to advertise the Vesuvius Funicular. The bouncy anthem has been made famous by a succession of artists including Pavarroti, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Grateful Dead; and by its association with pizza (which also has origins in Napoli, where Denza and Turce are from). It may seem a curious name for Kawaguchi’s cafe, until you analyse the translation of the original Italian lyrics with “mono no aware” in mind:

I climbed up high yesterday evening, oh, Nannina,

Do you know where? Do you know where?

Where this ungrateful heart

No longer pains me! No longer pains me!

Where fire burns, but if you run away,

It lets you be, it lets you be!

It doesn’t follow after or torment you

Just with a look, just with a look.

It continues on for a few more verses in the same vein: pleading for Nannina to travel up the mountain, escape, and eventually be married. It’s yearning and romantic but full of potential heartache and missed opportunities. It’s a cosy song with a sly aim to meddle with your emotions if you’re so inclined (we don’t find out if Nannina says yes). It’s laden with the principle of what goes up must come down.

Kawaguchi’s reference to this old-school Italian banger suits the homey melancholy of his story. It’s easy to see why millions of readers have plucked this novel from the galaxy of books available to them and turned it into one of the brightest stars. But at the same time there is something profoundly, ironically sad about it. What is it about our lives that so many of us are seeking nostalgia and sentimentality in our art, and will go back again and again for more of the same medicine? (Like BookTok’s @sivanreads, who, in a post after her mascara-smeared one, tells her hundreds of thousands of followers that she’s going back in, again and again, hoovering the whole series, even gripping the Japanese edition of the latest book raking it for signs of emotional triggers even though she can’t understand a word.)

It’s also an irony that cosy fiction elevates bookshops and libraries and cafes just as the real life spaces are in serious trouble. Bookstores in Japan are in decline; in the UK (where cosy Japanese and Korean books in translation are incredibly popular) libraries have long been under attack from budget cuts; just as they have been in Aotearoa, too. Let’s not get started on the challenges facing the coffee trade.

The rise of “healing” fiction in translation is in many ways an easy phenomenon to explain. People under pressure need escape, catharsis and emotional connection. Another contemporary publishing phenomenon, “romantasy”, offers a similar sort of relief in the form of horniness, dragons and leathers. But these publishing phenomena also beg some questions: When won’t we need “healing” books? What is art meant to do in times like these? Is it even OK to escape? And what’s on the other side of the trend?

The International Booker Prize longlist for 2025 was announced this week. Among the list of all first-time novelists is Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Japanese writer Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda. The novel is set in a distant future where humans are living in small tribes under the care of the Mothers. “Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world,” reads the blurb.

The Booker Prizes calls Kawakami’s novel “an astonishing vision of the end of our species”. It sounds brilliant. Disturbing, alarming and challenging. Not at all cosy and far from healing. It’s a reminder that there’s an entire, exciting body of contemporary literature that English-language readers are missing out. Cosy fiction has pushed the door open for more novels in translation – but when the crying is over, we’re going to need the confronting books and visionary authors in great numbers, too.