News & Developments

Film-Maker and Art Historian Win Country's Richest Non-Fiction Prizes

Two cultural trailblazers have won the country's richest non-fiction literary prizes in the toughest competition since the inauguration of the Copyright Licensing Awards eight years ago.
Critically acclaimed novelist, essayist and film-maker, Peter Wells MNZM was tonight awarded one of the $35,000 CLL Awards to write The Hungry Heart: The Enquiring Mind, a book of biographical essays on William Colenso.
CLL Writers' Awards judges' convenor, Jenny Jones says Wells' project is a daring re-examination of William Colenso's life.
‘The selection panel believed not many writers would attempt an almost poetic portrayal of the emotional man at the foundation of this country's colonial history.
‘Far from a conventional biography, this book will be an essay series that examines Colenso as an intellectual maverick who, among other things, was opposed to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.'
The award confirms Wells as an artist committed to change in New Zealand society, be it through documentaries, archiving at-risk architecture (Napier's Art Deco or Auckland's Civic Theatre), producing one of the earliest pieces of fiction in which a gay author published under his own name, or writing and co-directing dramas like 'A Death in the Family' which was produced at the height of the HIV-Aids crisis and looked at the ways stigma works in families and society.
Writer and curator Damian Skinner received the second $35,000 CLL Award for his project, The Hands of the Ancestors: Customary Māori Carvers in the Twentieth Century.
Skinner, a Pakeha born in Central Otago, now lives with a Māori family in Gisborne. He has been researching and writing about customary Māori art since the early 1990s. His publications include his 2006 Ph.D entitled Another Modernism: Māoritanga and Māori Modernism in the 20th Century and works Ihenga: Te Haerenga Hou - The Evolution of Māori Art in the 20th Century (2007) and Don Binney: NgāManu, NgāMotu/Birds, Islands (2003).
Jenny Jones says the renaissance of Māori carving in the 20th Century is usually credited to Apirana Ngata's Rotorua School of Māori Arts and Crafts. Damian Skinner proposes a more subtle and varied explanation of this, one of the great New Zealand stories of our time.
‘The rescue of Māori carving by the few is a huge part of the Māori renaissance. Damian Skinner promises a book covering new and exciting dimensions to that story.'
The Awards were presented at a ceremony at The Floating Pavilion, Auckland's Viaduct this evening.

Jones commented that the standard of entries this year was so high that the judging panel had difficulty getting the numbers down to a manageable shortlist and then again in selecting just two winners.
‘All the shortlisted entries and even many of those not shortlisted gave every indication of producing fine books on topics of national significance. Applicants should be encouraged to apply again if they were not successful this year.'
Earlier this year, Jill Trevelyan's biography, Rita Angus: An Artist's Life, for which she won a CLL Award, took the 2009 Montana Medal for Non-Fiction. Other CLL Award winning books include Lloyd Spencer Davis' Looking For Darwin and Stevan Eldred-Grigg's Diggers Hatters and Whores. A Plume of Bees: A Literary Biography of CK Stead by Judith Dell Panny and Martin Edmond's Zone of the Marvellous were both published this month and several other CLL award winning books are due for publication in 2010-2011.
Established in 2002, the CLL Writers' Awards are financed from copyright licensing revenue received by Copyright Licensing Limited (CLL) on behalf of authors and publishers.

CLL/NZSA Research Grants - winners
For the second year, CLL in association with the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) presented two research grants for fiction or non-fiction.
Jocelyn Robson was awarded a grant for her proposed biography of Grace Oakeshott, an English woman who left a successful career in London as a social and educational reformer and in 1907 faked her own death and under an assumed name, travelled to New Zealand with her lover.
‘This award enables me to continue my research into Grace Oakeshott's social and community activities in her adopted country,' says Ms Robson.
The second research grant was awarded to Dunedin-based filmmaker Bill Morris for his proposed story of New Zealand's changing relationship with whales. Moving from Antarctica to Tonga, Whaling Nation will be part history and part travelogue.
Both grants are valued at $3,500.