Steve Brawnius

Um, well, one answer to that is that I've been staging a contest, dragging it out, actually, very happily, for the past nine weeks at Reading Room.

One winner will receive all 16 shortlisted books.

And over nine weeks, I've asked them to send in an entry by nominating their favourite New Zealand book of the year and

of writing a few words why that is so.

And two books are way out in front.

Way out in front.

Nothing comes near either The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidji or A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda.

Yeah.

So how has it gone down?

It's gone down fabulously well with readers and the way they've written about it in these entries.

You know, these are people who are not like professional reviewers.

They're not doing it as some sort of objective assignment.

They're doing it from the heart and what they really think and feel.

And the level of attention that they're giving this book, it's extraordinary.

From any metric, this book absolutely deserves to be on the shortlist.

Yeah, all of the above, really.

Yeah, readability is a good one.

The sense that they've really engaged with the subject, that they have been imaginative, that they have set out a vision and achieved it, and have an X factor, I think.

You can see that across the board.

Take the illustrated non-fiction category, Amanda, which is basically our picture books, our comics,