Non-fiction writers' awards

Novelist, essayist and filmmaker Peter Wells and writer and curator Damian Skinner have won $35,000 at the Copyright Licensing Awards.

Peter Wells will write The Hungry Heart: The Enquiring Mind, a book of biographical essays on William Colenso.  Damian Skinner received the award for his project, The Hands of the Ancestors: Customary Maori Carvers in the Twentieth Century.

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.

Damian Skinner, a Pakeha born in Central Otago, now lives with a Maori family in Gisborne. He has been researching and writing about customary Maori art since the early 1990s. His publications include his 2006 Ph.D entitled Another Modernism: Maoritanga and Maori Modernism in the 20th Century and works Ihenga: Te Haerenga Hou – The Evolution of Maori Art in the 20th Century (2007) and Don Binney: NgaManu, NgaMotu/Birds, Islands (2003).

Jenny Jones says the renaissance of Maori carving in the 20th Century is usually credited to Apirana Ngata’s Rotorua School of Maori 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 Maori carving by the few is a huge part of the Maori renaissance. Damian Skinner promises a book covering new and exciting dimensions to that story.”

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.

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 $3500.

Copyright Licensing Awards

The Awards were presented at a ceremony at The Floating Pavilion, Auckland’s Viaduct on Thursday September 24.

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.