Interns 2023 – Damien Levi (Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi), Ruby Leonard and Callum Knight (Te Hika o Pāpāuma)
PANZ is very pleased to announce the successful recipients of the 2023 Creative New Zealand National Publishing Internships Initiative (colloquially know as the Intern Programme). In the new year Ruby Leonard will intern with Te Herenga Waka University Press, Callum Knight with HUIA while Damien Levi will take his place at Penguin Random House in Auckland.
The Intern Programme, administered by PANZ, provides paid internship opportunities each year for three new graduates of the Whitireia New Zealand publishing course to enter the industry and is highly coveted by both students and publishers alike.
Craig Gamble, Publishing Manager of Te Herenga Waka University Press was thrilled to be one of the successful publishers. “We at THWUP are delighted to have Ruby joining us as an intern in 2023. We value the energy and freshness that an intern brings to our workplace, just as much as we appreciate the extra capacity they give us. Ruby came to us for her work placement this year and impressed us with her obvious ability and hard work, we can’t wait to see what she will accomplish next year.”
The programme has produced some impressive results in past years with many publishers choosing to offer the interns full-time positions at the end of the programme, and a number of former interns now hold senior positions in publishing companies.
Odessa Owens, Senior Tutor, Publishing at Whitireia says “It’s hugely rewarding to see deserving students go into their dream jobs through these internships.”
Congratulations to all the successful students and publishers.
For more details on the Creative New Zealand National Publishing Internships Initiative click here.
It was a joy for PANZ to be back at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week. For obvious reasons we haven’t been able to host a collective stand since 2019 but this year we made our presence felt with a vibrant, stunning stand which provided a beautiful backdrop for some very fine books from Aotearoa New Zealand.
We received a very warm welcome from the book fair team and were thrilled to be gifted a certificate and some delicious bubbles and chocolates to acknowledge 25 years of the PANZ collective stand at Frankfurt. We’d also like to give a shout out to our trailblazing colleague, Dame Wendy Pye who led the way and has been attending Frankfurt with Sunshine Books for 40 years.
It was also a delight to reconnect with old friends – particularly Joy Reifgens and Christiane and Ann-Sophie Geipert-Arheilger our amazing stand helpers, and to make some new friends including Head of Mission at the NZ Embassy in Germany, Craig Hawke and Marina Wilmerstadt from Education NZ who both came along to our stand party. And on the party, thanks go to the NZ Embassy team for their support in providing some much enjoyed NZ wine and special thanks to Cornelia Loser who helped to ensure that it reached the stand at just the right time.
Otago University Press had 20 new babies in 2021, and we love them all! But there’s one title that is especially dear to our hearts: Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori Scholars at the Research Interface, edited by Jacinta Ruru and Linda Waimarie Nikora. This beautiful and very readable book gathers the stories of 24 Māori academics, who share their personal journeys and reveal what being Māori has meant for them in their work. We were honoured to be publishers of such an important project and we’ve been delighted that the book has been so warmly welcomed into the world, sparking so many conversations and enhancing understanding about how mātauranga Māori is positively influencing Western-dominated disciplines of knowledge in the research sector.
Entanglement by Bryan Walpert is our only title for 2021 and therefore our firm favourite! Wonderfully the Listener has selected it for the best books of 2021. Bryan is known in this country for his poetry and short fiction, including a novella that won the Seizure Viva La Novella Prize in Australia last year, and Entanglement is his first novel. It’s an erudite and elegantly written work that weaves three apparently separate stories: a time-traveller in the US, a novelist researching at the Centre for Time in Sydney and a writer at a lake retreat in New Zealand. I love that Maddy Hamill, author of Specimen, says: “I freaking love this novel”, and that Gigi Fenster, author of A Good Winter, says she slowed down her reading because she didn’t want to finish. So hard to pick my favourite book by another publisher as there are some superb books out there, so I’ll choose two!
My personal favourite for the year was Tikanga: An Introduction to te ao Māori. The reason is that it is a book Pat and I wanted to publish nearly 40 years ago and were told it couldn’t be done. Then we resurrected the idea some years ago and finally got it over the line, and it has been so heartening to see the reaction to the book. Among a number of special books this year, it stands out for me.
Robbie Burton, Publisher & Managing Director, Potton & Burton
My favourite QWP title for the year: Prague In My Bones: A Memoir by Jindra Tichy
Toitoi Media Ltd
It’s always hard to choose the book I was most proud to publish in any given year, especially as Bateman publishes such a diverse list. However, I think because we have had so much time at home nesting of late, the cookbooks and gardening book we published in 2021 have been the most satisfying to watch take shape. Therefore, my pick would have to be Ashia Ismail-Singer’s Saffron Swirls and Cardamom Dust, a feast for all the senses. And I would have been so proud to publish Lucy Mackintosh’s fascinating Shifting Grounds, though I doubt anyone could have improved on the beautiful job BWB did in producing that book.
Never thought I’d say this(!), but the highlight of my publishing year was National Identity by Simon Bridges. Simon was an A++ author, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him. He’s an intelligent writer, and we’ve had compliments from all corners.
Times Like These by Michelle Langstone
Favourite book published: I’m going to sneak in a double — Paula Morris and Alison Wong’s A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand and Chris Tse and Emma Barnes’ Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. They are two anthologies of New Zealand writing that allowed communities to see themselves and their imaginative worlds out in lights. And both have been brilliantly brought together by editors doing the hard mahi finding new voices and brilliant stories.
The Edible Backyard by Kath Irvine has to be one of my highlights for 2021. It is the perfect garden companion with glorious photos and illustrations. Kath is a font of knowledge and her relaxed, witty style is a delight to read: like having an all-knowing aunt at your beck and call. I am immensely proud of She is Not Your Rehab by Matt Brown and Sarah Brown. It is a powerful and inspirational story, and I am thrilled with the success it has had. The feedback from traditional and non-traditional readers alike has been truly rewarding and it is a welcome reminder of the life-changing magic a book can offer.
I’m pleased and proud to have published Tania Clifton-Smith’s How to Take a Breath in this strange year we’ve had. It’s a book that is easy to read and simple to use, and has lessons for us all whether we are wanting to hold our anxieties at bay, sleep better or see improvements in our exercising. And a bonus is that Tania is an expert on Long Covid, which we’d all barely heard of when the book was commissioned. When in doubt, breathe out! And if you just want to luxuriate in some fabulous images of flourishing gardens of all kinds around Aotearoa, then dip into the pages of In the Company of Gardeners (Juliet Nicholas and Sue Allison) to be transported to quiet and lovely places and be introduced to the talented and fascinating people who developed them.
The pre-lockdown half of 2021 feels like an eternity ago, so while there are lots of books I am proud to have published from then — not least the memoirs The Mirror Book and From the Centre — my pick is a novel that also touches on memoir. Launched, sadly, on the very night the Auckland lockdown was announced, Crazy Love by Rosetta Allan is an honest, open, heart-breaking and funny novel about a marriage with more than its fair share of challenges. It was such a brave book to write because it draws so heavily on Rosetta’s own life. In doing so, it prompts us to consider the line between fiction and memoir. Might fiction, in being freer from libel and the fear of hurting others, let you be more truthful about your reality? How truthful is reality when distorted by drugs, illness, desperation and memory? Is fiction pure invention or re-creation and shaping of life? Not that you have much time to dwell on such questions as the story rockets along and you really don’t want to put it down.
Grrrrr, it’s a tie. Homecooked by Lucy Corry is a brilliant, beautiful and inspiring seasonal cookbook by a deeply talented and truly great New Zealand food writer that (I promise) you will return and return and return to forever. Megan Dunn’s Things I Learned at Art School is Gen X genius and totally inimitable.
2022 will, for me, forever be associated with our Diary of a Wimpy Kid series: as the mother of an eight year old in lockdown books have been more important than ever and this series has brought much light relief to our days. I have enjoyed sharing them around the neighbourhood and popping into the office to see if advances of the new one had arrived. My most admired book from another publisher this year is Should We Stay Or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver (so bracingly funny and imaginative yet true and poignant) although in terms of marketing and publicity it would have to be Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You – that book has been absolutely everywhere – nice work A&U!
My favourite pick for this year’s publications has to be, without doubt, The Time Lizard’s Archaeologist by Trisha Hanifin, published by Cloud Ink Press. Trisha’s main narrator is a “traveller” who experiences alternative times and realities, thus bringing to light the effects of overexploitation of the world’s resources and of a mysterious virus. The rise of a fundamentalist religious order that takes control in response to the breakdown of society is frightening and so easily could be true.
Among Oratia’s picture book list this year, Jill Bevan-Brown’s debut really touched me. Blimmin’ Koro shows how family aroha stays strong for a father and grandfather who succumbs to dementia, a message that resonated with recent experience in our family. Trish Bowles’ sensitive illustrations help transform what could be a sad story into something uplifting and full of love.
Let’s be honest, we parents, I mean publishers, never ever have favourites! And as for 2021, we are happy to have actually survived to the almost-end. There are many books that the Scholastic New Zealand team is proud to have published this year, but there’s one particularly plucky and quietly gentle one that we love because it ignites the imagination and celebrates discovery, determination and daring to dream. These, along with an unstoppable spirit of adventure and the unfailing love of family, are what made Ming’s Iceberg, written by Kiri Lightfoot and illustrated by Kimberly Andrews, a joy for us to publish for children and anyone who looks at our beautiful, big wide world with a sense of wonder and what-if . . .
No favourites! But in the spirit of publisher’s choice, I’ll nominate Aurore Petit’s A Mother Is a House. For me this book still carries the sparkle of its French publisher Valérie Cussaguet as she presented it to me at the Montreuil book fair, heaving with pre-pandemic crowds two years ago – animatedly pointing out favourite illustrations and insisting I look again to catch the details. The book describes a mother through a baby’s eyes – she blazes off the page in neon colour: a food dispenser, a doctor, a hillside, an artwork, an umbrella. It’s fun to read with children and a pretty nice gift for a mother too.
As you say choosing a favourite is unfair so under protest our favourite child PROTEST: Shaping Aotearoa by Mandy Hager.
