23 July 2008

Of Montanas, Skodas and Likeable Things

Montana Book Awards

The biggest thing first: congratulations to all the winners, and all the nominees, in the Montana Book Awards, which were announced in Wellington on Monday night. In particular, I want to congratulate Mary McCallum, who won the Best First Book of Fiction and overall Reader's Choice Awards for her novel The Blue, and Jessica Le Bas, who won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry for her collection Incognito. Charlotte Grimshaw's Opportunity - a short fiction collection - won the overall Fiction award, and Janet Charman's Cold Snack the Poetry award.

The Skoda Diaries

The Skoda Diaries, a new story by me - one of my short, weird ones - is now online at Southern Ocean Review, which also has a nice capsule review of Transported and a number of other books (including Swings and Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood).

If you seek a key to the Skoda, you might want to read up on the history of the Social Credit Political League. Of course, most of this particular short fiction is fiction, but the "controversial construction project" referred to in the Wikipedia article was the building of the Clyde Dam on the Clutha River - the moment when Social Credit jumped the shark.

Likeable Things

Groomed by a Bird, a poem by Emma Barnes

The cover of My Iron Spine, a poetry collection by Helen Rickerby

St Clair Apartments, a painting by James Dignan

Why I Write, an examination of motives (one motive per blog post), by Sean Molloy

4 comments:

Emma Barnes said...

Thanks for linking to my poem Tim! Glad to hear it's likeable!

Mary McCallum said...

Thanks Tim! It was an exciting night. I have started back with earnest to novel no. 2 now -- the adrenaline or the excitement or something....

Sean_Molloy said...

Thanks Tim. I appreciate the thumbs up!

Helen Rickerby said...

Hi Tim, thanks for including my book cover as a likeable thing, I'm quite delighted. Since that version, we've altered it a little. I hope you'll find the final version just as likeable.