Steve Brawnius

It's the red-letter date of the calendar.

This is the one that has the hype, the interest, even a touch of glamour.

It goes live at the Aotea Centre in

in Auckland for 10 years now.

It's been sponsored pretty generously, actually, by Occam New Zealand, and it recognises the best of the best in basically four categories, fiction, non-fiction, illustrated, non-fiction, and poetry.

And there's good money to be had.

The winner of the fiction prize pockets $65,000 in hard cash.

And the other winners get $12,000, which is considerably less, but not a bad day at the office.

It is a huge game changer.

To write a book, it's such a long, hard, lonely and doubtful kind of project.

and you wonder why you do it.

But if you are gifted and lucky enough, and it's that combination, I think, which is at work, to win an award at the Occams, then it's great confirmation that this project was worthwhile, that it has been recognised.

It can lead to a huge boost in sales, but that's going to be dependent on the title.

I think we saw that fairly significantly last year when Damien Wilkins won the Fiction Prize for Delirious.

It hadn't really been a bestseller up until then.

And after then, people cottoned on that this was actually a really, really good book.

And it truly is.

I named it the best novel of that year at Reading Room at the end of 2024.

And yeah, the Occam machine boosted its appeal and put the word out.

So that was really great.