A Wellington writer's debut novel has been shortlisted in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
Mary McCallum is a finalist in the fiction category with her first book, The Blue. She is up against Laurence Fearnley, for Edwin & Matilda, Alice Tawhai, for Luminous, and Charlotte Grimshaw, for Opportunity.
McCallum has been a broadcast journalist in New Zealand and Europe, and works as a freelance writer and reviewer.
She is one of five Wellington finalists in the country's most prestigious literary awards.
Gregory O'Brien is shortlisted in the reference and anthology category for A Nest of Singing Birds: 100 years of the New Zealand School Journal, and Mary Varnham, a writer and editor, is in the same category for The Transit of Venus.
Lieutenant Colonel Terry Kinloch, of Upper Hutt, is a finalist in the history category for Devils on Horses, about the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade in World War I, and Johanna Aitchison is a poetry finalist with A Long Girl Ago.
The 25 finalists across all eight categories were announced today. The winner of each category receives $5000, and the Montana medal for non-fiction and the Montana medal for poetry or fiction have prizes of $10,000 each.
The results will be announced on July 21.
The three judges - arts critic and journalist Lynn Freeman, publisher David Elworthy and fiction writer Tim Corballis - praised the non-fiction finalists, saying they were standouts in the more than 220 books entered in the awards.
"From inner-city graffiti to the peaks of the Southern Alps, from a remote 19th-century whaling station to the impact on our wetlands of decades of use and abuse, from the recognition of moko to an insight into the work of one of our most reclusive artists ...
"We have been impressed by the passion, dedication and expertise."
See Also
