The 2022 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults have just wrapped up with a ceremony at Wellington College. Books editor Catherine Woulfe has the results – and big feelings. 

Winner of the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award and $7,500; winner of the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction and $7,500; winner of the Russell Clark Award for Illustration and $7,500: Atua: Māori Gods and Legends, by Gavin Bishop (Puffin, Penguin Random House)

Tonight belongs to Gavin Bishop. With his splendid hardback Atua, Bishop (O.N.Z.M, Ngāti Pukeko, Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Mahuta, Tainui) took out three of the big six categories, including the supreme award, the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year.

It’s the fifth time he’s won book of the year (more, even, than the award’s namesake Margaret Mahy), the third time he’s won the non-fiction category, and the fifth time he’s won for illustration. There’s all sorts of ways to crunch the numbers, plus a bunch of other awards and accolades not mentioned here, but at this point let’s just say he’s the man.

Atua begins with the story of creation – Rangi and Papa, the kids, the “sweaty darkness between their parents”. It moves from there into stories of land and sea, of war and the first woman, of Hine-nui-te-pō, Māui-potiki, Tāwhaki’s climb through the heavens. A blue, blue section at the end tells the story of the discovery of Aotearoa. “I have steered a linear path through the complex flow of stories,” Bishop explains in an extensive, generous end note. “Told differently by each tribe, from the creation of the sky and the earth to the establishment of the natural world where we live today.”

Atua was always going to be a champion among books. On my son’s bookshelf it assumes the air of a black-backed gull: it’s huge, and black, and just clearly superior. Then you open it up and you’re hit with wild splashes of lilac and yellow and corner-dairy blue, and what also comes through is a tangible sense of the artist’s own joy in creation – it’s clear that Bishop absolutely revelled in these humungous pages, and in filling them up.

He’s also managed to rewrite these old stories with a real sense of wonder, and a lightness in the text. “Tānemahuta was clearly his mother’s favourite,” he writes. “She gave him the best and biggest job – god of forests, birds and insects. But she had forgotten there was no room for tall trees between her body and her husband’s.”

Here’s convenor of judges, educationalist and author Pauline (Vaeluaga) Smith: “Atua is an instant classic, a ‘must have’ for every Kiwi household and library, that is packaged in stunning production values … The book is much more than a list of Gods and legendary heroes – it’s a family tree, presented with power and simplicity. The text is never overstated, with the glory of the illustrations as the primary mode of storytelling, rewarding the reader who closely examines them.”

(The other judges on the English language panel were writer Kyle Mewburn, public librarian Laura Caygill, children’s bookseller, reviewer and author Adele Broadbent, and Poutiaki Rauemi/National Manager Māori for Services to Schools at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand, Ruki Tobin.)

Here’s what I wrote about Atua when I first saw it:

A masterwork. A big beautiful hardback masterwork. My boy grabbed it the moment it arrived and gasped, “Is this for kids?”

It is, but it’s also for adults, and it’ll make them gasp too.

The format is similar to Bishop’s recent picture books Aotearoa: The New Zealand Story and Wildlife of Aotearoa, both terrific, both involving immense amounts of research, illustration and writing, but there is an extra layer of magic to Atua. Here Bishop is working with stories, and with whakapapa, and he is weaving meaning. I think it is the best work he has ever done … 

I still think Atua is Bishop’s best ever, which is saying something for a guy who’s put out more than 60 books. (I do adore, as well, his recent series of sweet board books, especially Koro, about a kid making pūha and egg sandwiches with their grandpa.) But what’s really exciting about Atua, and about this point in Bishop’s career, is the energy – each page practically crackles with it, and you put the book down knowing there just have to be more, so many more beautiful stories to come.

Winner of the Wright Family Foundation Te Kura Pounamu Award for te reo Māori and $7,500: I Waho, i te Moana, written by Yvonne Morrison, translated by Pānia Papa and illustrated by Jenny Cooper (Scholastic New Zealand)

I don’t speak te reo so will steer clear of any analysis here in lieu of the judges’ comments: they praised its standard and beautiful flow of reo as well as the expertise of the translator, and said the illustrations bring to life the authenticity of this story about the many taniwha that act as guardians in the moana.

I’ll add that the illustrations are fantastic, with a quiet sense of humour – I love the goggle-eyed flounder – and make this a book that you could happily pore over with a child even if you’re not familiar with te reo.

(The judges for this award were Anahera Morehu, tumuaki tuākana/immediate past president of the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa; communications specialist Te Amohaere Morehu; online content service and rauemi developer – te ao Māori at the National Library, Horowaitai Roberts-Tuahine; and Ruki Tobin, who was also on the English language panel.)

Winner of the Picture Book Award and $7,500: Lion Guards the Cake, by Ruth Paul (Scholastic New Zealand)

In my strong and impassioned opinion, something went wonky with the picture book judging. I’m shocked that the Huia titles, The Eight Gifts of Te Wheke and The Greatest Haka Festival on Earth, both dipped out. I’ve raved about both before – they’re exceptional even by Huia standards – and thought they were clear and obvious favourites for the prize. Te Wheke especially. It’s a book about a gnarly old octopus pulling a kid into the sea, and her brother figuring out a trick to get her back. 

“The story is so strong you could read it without pictures and it would still be lush and tense and creepy as hell,” I wrote of Te Wheke. “But the illustrations are astonishing … Another thing I love: the mum in this book is drawn big and strong and she has boobs. She looks like she gives great hugs but takes zero shit. She looks real.”

Lion Guards the Cake is a sweet story about a lion statue hopping off its plinth and gradually gobbling up a cake, then whipping up a George’s Marvellous Medicine-esque replacement. The judges “loved the masterfully blended words and images, calling it confident storytelling of the highest calibre.”

It’s not that it’s bad, I don’t mind reading it (and I do resent reading a lot of picture books, especially when they’ve tried rhyme and failed, which is almost always). It’s just not as good as others. 

I asked my seven-year-old to give me his picks and he said “The haka festival, then straight next would be Te Wheke. Then leave a bit of a gap and then we put My Cat Can See Ghosts, and then Bumblebee Grumblebee. And then a really really really big gap, and then Lion Guards the Cake.”

But then the three-year-old started whacking her honey-loaded butter knife on the table and hollering LION GUARDS THE CAKE! LION GUARDS THE CAKE! 

I can only imagine something similar went down in the judging room. 

Winner of the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Junior Fiction Award and $7,500: The Memory Thief, by Leonie Agnew (Penguin Random House NZ)

Extremely strong field here – I’ve read all the finalists and could see a path to victory for each one of them, and that’s unusual. 

(I love Sonya Wilson’s Fiordland faerie eco-adventure Spark Hunter the most by a long shot, but she at least won the NZSA Best First Book Award, plus $2,500.)

What I really like about the winner, The Memory Thief, is that it has a good big dollop of scary. The main character is a boy who is also a troll. He’s confined to a park and turns to stone every dawn. This means the action happens at night, which right away makes it creepy and inneresting. There’s also the merest hint of a love story, disguised as a top-tier friendship. Ideal. (I want a YA version of this book so bad.)

Plus, Agnew is very good at the craft side of things: her sentences sing, and she keeps the threads of tension stretched pingingly tight. 

One of the main themes is how a person is made up of memories, and what happens when those memories disappear. It could’ve all got very complicated (the troll survives by “eating” memories, and each day forgets his own) but she somehow kept it clear and compelling. Cool.

Winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award and $7,500: Learning to Love Blue, by Saradha Koirala (Record Press)

So that was unexpected. I really thought it was Eileen Merriman’s year – Violet Black is pacey as hell and it’s about vaccines and a weird fever and an elite team of superkids in the desert, plus pashing – but the judges were clearly in the mood for precisely the opposite. 

Learning to Love Blue is the sequel to 2017’s Lonesome When You Go. It’s a quiet and mundane story about Paige, a musical teenager who’s left her home in New Zealand to try her chances with bands in Melbourne. It’s about that weird bedding-in stage where you don’t have any friends yet and you’re not sure if stuff’s going to work out. 

When I said mundane before I meant it in both senses: this book is a bit dull, and it’s also very much of this earthly world. There’s heaps and heaps of text spent on setting up instruments and plugging in amps and small talk and arranging to meet later and getting from A to B. Conversely, our protagonist falls in love almost entirely off the page, and seems to be more into Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell than she is Spike, her paramour. I adore YA but I’m really not feeling it.