Creative New Zealand congratulates winners

Creative New Zealand congratulates winners

Creative New Zealand congratulates the winners of the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, presented at a gala awards ceremony in Auckland tonight.

Stephen Wainwright, Creative New Zealand Chief Executive, said that the annual Montana New Zealand Book Awards celebrate this country's best writing and publishing.

"Creative New Zealand is proud to support these important awards because they play an important role in profiling New Zealand writing and building a strong literary landscape," Stephen Wainwright said. "We're also pleased to have supported a number of this year's finalists, either to write their books or to have their books published."

Lloyd Jones' novel, Mister Pip (Penguin Books), won the 2007 Montana Medal for fiction or poetry, and was also the clear winner of this year's Readers' Choice Award. Earlier this year, Mister Pip won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Jones, who wrote Mister Pip with the support of a Creative New Zealand grant, will head to Germany next month where he will spend a year in Berlin undertaking the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency. He plans to use the residency to work on a new novel as well as two non-fiction projects.

The winner of the 2007 Montana Medal for non-fiction is Eagle's Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand (Te Papa Press). This two-volume work took author and painter Audrey Eagle more than 50 years to complete. It contains more than 800 hand-painted plates of every New Zealand tree and shrub, some of which are now extinct.

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