Stacy wins everything

International best-selling author Stacy Gregg (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Maru Hauraki) has won the top award in the children’s book awards – finally. Her success at Wednesday night’s 2024 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults is all about the power of nine: her book Nine Girls was the ninth time she has been nominated for the awards. Her failure to win was getting a bit silly. Despite (or perhaps because of) earning pots of money as a children’s author since her first book in the Pony Club Secrets series was published in 2007 – her 36 novels and picture books have sold close to three million copies in a dozen different languages – she has constantly fallen short of honours as bestowed by the New Zealand kids book trade.
But justice was restored when Nine Girls received the highest accolade in New Zealand children’s literature, the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year, as well as winning the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction. Wednesday night was a really good payday for the Auckland author. Both awards paid out $8500 each. She pocketed the loot at the awards ceremony held at Wellington’s Pipitea Marae.
The book marks the first time she’s explored te ao Māori. She backgrounded Nine Girls in a story she wrote for ReadingRoom in March: “When I decided to write about my family I had no interest in turning their story into that other kind of self-serving lie, the memoir. What I wanted to do was stick to my knitting and tell an epic, middle-grade adventure and at the same time capture what life was really like growing up in 80s Ngāruawāhia in a family that was unknowingly reconciling itself with the downstream consequences of being colonised into abandoning their taha Māori.”
The 2024 kids book awards featured one of the strongest fields for a long, long time. Finalists included two actual legends, Tessa Duder and Joy Cowley. Nine Girls was up against Rachael King’s bestseller The Grimmelings.
To the other winners who weren’t Stacy Gregg. The Picture Book Award went to Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai by Michaela Keeble, illustrated by Tokerau Brown; the Young Adult Fiction Award was won by Catch a Falling Star by Eileen Merriman, with judges praising her handling of the teenage protagonist’s escalating mental health problems; Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan to Rewild Every City on Earth by Steve Mushin was named the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction winner; the NZSA Best First Book Award was awarded to Ned Wenlock for his graphic novel Tsunami, a graphic novel for older readers; and the winner of the Russell Clark Award for Illustration was – naturally, inevitably, because no one holds a candle to this guy – Gavin Bishop (Tainui, Ngāti Awa). The Bish has collected more awards at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults than any other author or illustrator. His book Patu: The New Zealand Wars is best described as a fucking masterpiece.
Huzzah to all the winners. A shout-out, too, to award sponsors Hell Pizza, The Mātātuhi Foundation, good old LIANZA Te Rau Herenga o Aotearoa (the association for library and information professionals in New Zealand), and The Wright Family Foundation. Yes, the Wright family, which sponsors a diverse portfolio of worthy recipients such as the New Zealand Spelling Bee and the Platform – yes, the Platform.
Chief and loudest huzzah of course to Stacy Gregg. I adore Stace. We live around the corner from each other and our occasional cups of tea are the closest thing I have to experiencing a literary salon. She’s got a brilliant mind and a restless, almost manic energy and a total immersive commitment to te ao Māori. Good to see the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults come to its senses and give her what she deserves: respect.
Nine Girls (Penguin, $22) by Stacy Gregg, a novel for middle-grade readers, is available in bookstores nationwide.