by Christine Dann
If you had been given permission to explore Wellington’s Parliamentary Library on a weekday afternoon in 1907, you might have been very surprised to see – among the staff and other users in jackets and ties – a teenage girl settled comfortably in a corner, with a stack of books close to hand. If you came at closing time, you might even have overheard her father (a friend of the Chief Librarian, as well as Premier Richard John Seddon) say “Come on, Kathleen, it’s time to go home now.”
It was only because her father (the wealthy businessman Harold Beauchamp) was so well-connected that Kathleen had access to the library, but no one could complain that she did not make made good use of her precious after-school time there. According to the Parliamentary webpage on her activities there:
News from Ockham Book Awards
Whanganui writer Airini Beautrais has won the $57,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her book
Bug Week – the first person to take out the category for a collection of short stories in more than a decade.
Beautrais is well-known as a poet, but this is her first book of fiction, published by Victoria University Press. She received the prize ahead of acclaimed novelists Catherine Chidgey and Pip Adam, both previous winners, and Brannavan Gnanalingam, shortlisted for the fiction prize in 2018.
The Fiction category’s convenor of judges, Kiran Dass, says
‘Knockout’ short story collection wins country’s richest writing prize Whanganui writer Airini Beautrais has won the $57,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her book Bug Week – the first person .
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Use/Reproduction
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Notes N.Z. mosaic map series.
National yard grid.
Shows mouth of Taihiki River, named roads, streams, Wairua Pa, hospital, school and monument.
Electronic reproduction of Land Information New Zealand original. Wellington, N.Z. : University of Auckland, 2013. Mode of access: World Wide Web.
1st ed.