Dame Ardern to no-show Ockham Awards, despite being the highest-profile finalist

The biggest night in the book trade will celebrate 'the best of the best' in Auckland next week, but one notable finalist will now be a no-show at the Ockham Awards

The highest-profile finalist in the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards will be a no-show at the prestigious event in Auckland next week.

Former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern's bestselling first book, A Different Kind of Power, has made the shortlist for the awards in the General Non-Fiction category.

She is up against journalist and natural history writer Naomi Arnold's Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa; TV producer and writer Peta Carey's The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era; and This Compulsion in Us by novelist and creative writing teacher Tina Makereti.

But Dame Jacinda has told Newsroom's Reading Room Editor Steve Braunias that she won't be attending the awards ceremony on Wednesday night, because she has an engagement in Australia - where she resides - for another of her books.

"I assumed that she would [show]," Braunias tells The Detail after he exclusively revealed the news in his Newsroom newsletter this morning.

"I find it very surprising, and I have to say it's disappointing. Everyone else will be there.

She told him that "she had a prior commitment."

"I questioned that, and word came back from official channels that before she learned she was on the shortlist, she had booked an event in Australia, tied in with the upcoming book that she has written - a guide for teenagers.

"That book, by the way, is not published in Australia until the first week of June, and that's three weeks away."

But he says Ardern, who has "a good chance" at winning her category, will be back in Auckland a few days after the Awards as a guest at the Auckland Writers Festival.

When describing the annual book awards, Braunias says, "within the book trade, it doesn't get bigger than this".

"This is the premier event of the year, it's the red letter date of the calendar. This is the one that has the hype, the interest, even a touch of glamour."

The event, he says, is sponsored "very generously, actually" by Ockham New Zealand, and it recognises the "best of the best" in four categories - Fiction, Poetry, Illustrated Non-Fiction and General Non-Fiction.

The winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction will receive $65,000, while the winners of the other three categories will pocket $12,000.

Internationally acclaimed writer Catherine Chidgey is, again, in the running for the awards' top $65,000 prize with her entry, The Book of Guilt.

She has won the award twice before - the only author to have done so - for The Wish Child in 2017 and The Axeman's Carnival in 2023.

"You don't get bigger in the fiction game than Catherine Chidgey," says Braunias.

But Chidgey is facing strong competition against essayist Ingrid Horrocks with All Her Lives; poet and short story writer Laura Vincent with Hoods Landing; and author Sam Mahon with How to Paint a Nude.

Braunias, whose book about the Polkinghorne trial was long-listed this year in the General Non-Fiction category and who has authored another 13 books, says winning an Ockham Award is "a huge game-changer.

"To write a book is such a long, hard, lonely, doubtful kind of project. And you wonder why you do it.

"But if you are gifted and lucky enough - and it's that combination I think which is at work - to win an award at the Ockhams, then it's great confirmation that this project was worthwhile, that it has been recognised.

"And it can lead to a huge boost in sales."

The poetry finalists this year are poet and academic Anna Jackson for Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts; poet and critic Erik Kennedy for Sick Power Trip; and debut poets Sophie van Waardenberg for No Good and Nafanua Purcell Kersel for Black Sugarcane.

Vying for Illustrated Non-Fiction are emeritus professor of history Charlotte Macdonald for Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire; first-time author and emeritus professor of botany Philip Garnock-Jones for He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers; art curator Sarah Farrar for Mark Adams: A Survey - He Kohinga Whakaahua; and historian Elizabeth Cox for Mr Ward's Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street.

"The good facet about these picture books is they are not just good to look at, they have good stories to tell and really good text," says Braunias.

He says it's a formidable finalist list this year, and he will be at the event on Wednesday night to see who wins the top prizes, unlike all the finalists.

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