Awards

2024 PANZ Book Design Award Finalists: Children’s Books

It’s time to celebrate an oft overlooked aspect of book creation—the design. The Publishers Association of New Zealand has just announced the shortlist for Aotearoa’s best-designed books in nine categories. Here we are showcasing the three which focus on books…

2024 NZCYA Best First Book Finalists

We’ve prepared something special this year to honour the Best First Book Finalists. Michael Park School librarian Kura Rutherford corralled her student librarians into considering the shortlist and awarding their own medals for merits they deemed worthy. See the list…

2024 NZCYA Te Kura Pounamu Award Finalists

For the Te Kura Pounamu finalists we asked the publishers why it was important to them to publish these particular books in te reo Māori, and our te reo editor Faith Tupou makes some comments as well. Read our comments…

2024 NZCYA Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction Finalists

The Non-Fiction shortlist is absolutely top class. We asked the finalists to pose a couple of questions to each other about their books. Read our comments about the books in all the categories here. Selina Tusitala Marsh asks Gavin Bishop……

2024 NZCYA Young Adult Finalists: Why I Wrote This Book

This year’s NZCYA YA finalists span a huge range of genres, settings, and themes. From the journey of an escaped convict as she tries to forge a life in colonial Tāmaki Makaurau, to a graphic novel about the struggles of…

2024 NZCYA Russell Clark Illustration Finalists

The Sapling is excited to continue its tradition of sharing drafts, sketches and process work from the NZCYA illustration award finalists. Thanks to the Book Awards Trust for the book descriptions, the publishers for organising the images and the artists for generously…

2024 NZCYA Picture Book Award Finalists

The picture book finalist pukapuka are as varied as they are colourful. Linda Jane Keegan takes the shortlisted books to a few classes at Tākaka Primary School and asks the tamariki what they think. See our comments on the complete…

The Finalists of the 2024 NZ Kids’ Books Awards Are…

Each year, the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults make for a massive occasion in the Aotearoa kids’ book world—move over Oscars, out of the way Silver Scrolls. This is our night. Well, nearly. Awards night isn’t until August, but between…

Books have Borders: The Bologna Book Fair

Selling children’s book rights into new territories, languages, and formats is the business of the Bologna Book Fair in Italy. The 61st year of the fair took place last week and attracted over 1,500 exhibitors and a total of 31,735…