May 18, 2023
Winning book a celebration of kai
Author and photographer Christall Lowe from Ngāti Kauwhata, Tainui, and Ngāti Maniapoto has won the illustrated non-fiction section of this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from My Family Table takes as its starting point recipes shared with her whanau.
She says heritage and whānau gave a mauri to the photographs, recipes and stories.
“My intention in everything that I capture is to capture the mauri of that particular thing and I wanted my entire book to be a celebration of the life of kai in my whanau and I think we achieved that,” Lowe says.
The top prize for fiction went to Ngāruawāhia-based writer Catherine Chidgey for her seventh novel, The Axeman’s Carnival, while Te Atiawa writer Alice Te Punga Somerville won the poetry award for Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised.