The New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults have been a key part of New Zealand’s library calendar for over 75 years. This month, as we celebrate this year’s winners, let’s take a look back at the history of the awards.
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The Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa  established the first award for New Zealand children’s fiction with the Esther Glen Award for Fiction in 1945 and has been involved in recognising excellence in New Zealand children’s literature ever since.  LIANZA added other awards over the years including the Russell Clark Award for Illustration in 1975, and the Elsie Locke Non-fiction Award in 1986. The Te Kura Pounamu Award for literature written in Te Reo Mäori was established in 1996, in partnership with Te Rōpū Whakahau.

The awards had several different names, and sponsors, over the years, including AIM Toothpaste and NZ Post Book Awards. Known in 1982 as the New Zealand Government Publishing Award, the first top prize for Children’s Book of the Year was awarded to Joy Cowley’s The Silent One, illustrated by Sherryl Jordan. The book follows the story of Jonasi, a deaf boy who befriends a giant turtle. Joy Cowley would go on to win the top prize three more times (for Bow Down Shadrach, Hunter, and Snake and Lizard), while Sherryl Jordan would win again in 1991 for her book Rocco.
The 1982 awards were the first time a prize specifically for celebrating the best New Zealand picture books was awarded. The first book to win the Picture Book category was Patricia Grace and Robyn Kahukiwa’s The Kuia and the Spider.

As the LIANZA Children’s Book Awards  and the Kiwi children’s book industry  grew over time, more new categories were added. Non-Fiction, Best First Book, and separate awards for junior and senior Fiction were added in the early 1990s, when the awards operated as the AIM Children’s Book Awards; and in 1997 as the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards, a Children’s Choice Award debuted.
LIANZA’s own annual book awards, the LIANZA Children’s Book Awards, merged with The New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2016. This has enabled the legacy of the LIANZA Children’s Book Awards to be strengthened.

This merger brought the oldest children’s literature award in New Zealand, LIANZA’s Esther Glen Award, under the banner of the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, along with the Elsie Locke Award for children’s non-fiction and the Te Kura Pounamu Award for Te Reo Māori.
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LIANZA is still heavily involved in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. In 2020 LIANZA received funding from Copyright Licencing NZ and hosted the first online Books Alive events programme with finalists and librarians who read finalist books in a series of virtual storytimes. The New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme (NZLPP) has now ensured these online events can continue through until 2022 by providing a strategic grant  to LIANZA.

Librarians and members of LIANZA, including LIANZA past presidents and council members have all played a crucial part in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, by volunteering as judges and convenor of judges to ensure the library voice continues to be  heard throughout these prestigious awards. ​

The open movement is a loose collection of enterprises aimed at making information, data, and knowledge, more freely available to everyone. The activities and outputs of this diverse movement are many and varied, and this has created a complex, dynamic, multifaceted, and sometimes bewildering ecosystem of tools, resources, databases, and websites that (perhaps paradoxically given the aims of the movement) can be difficult to navigate. These include open access publishing, open collaboration, open data, open democracy, open GLAM, open government, open science, and open-source software and hardware.
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It is important to note that not all information can be open. For perfectly justified and legitimate legal, ethical, and cultural reasons, some information must remain privileged for security reasons, or to protect people’s rights and privacy. Only at the extreme end of the open movement would you find advocates for freedom of all information. However, the open movement would contend that the default position for most information that is not privileged in this way should be for it to be open and freely available to everyone. In fact, most would go further and say that we must be careful to make sure that the reasons given for restricting access to information are credible and not being weaponized to protect vested interests or to serve some other agenda or purpose. This is a difficult area that also impinges on other rights and freedoms, including the right to protect one’s own intellectual or cultural property. Regardless of the benefits of ‘openness’, hostility to the open movement should not be underestimated. There are also many unresolved issues around cyber security, privacy, net safety, etc.

The open movement generally recognizes that simply making information available is not necessarily useful to most of us, and that without relevant context (metadata), and discovery tools, much of it will be meaningless. There is an important equity issue here. Not everyone is equally well resourced to find, understand, and use information. Making information open and available is the first step, but this is just equality of opportunity. If we really want equity of outcome (or going even further than that, what Amartya Sen calls ‘equality of autonomy’) then the information must be accompanied by tools and user interfaces that address the fundamental imbalances in society that cause information inequity. That’s easier said than done, and beyond the scope of a short article like this, but it is a key aspiration of most people active in the open movement. However, the open movement is generally made up of self-selecting individuals who have the time and resources to commit to what often amounts to unpaid work. Arguably, this means that most communities within the open movement are poorly representative of diversity in the population at large, making them ill-equipped to address these inequities.

Similar things are happening in science, and it’s interesting to compare the open movement with citizen science. Citizen science aims to democratize science by making the tools of science more widely available to people without formal scientific training or access to scientific equipment, but all too often this ends up being a thinly veiled attempt by scientists to outsource their data collection. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, and there are clear benefits for the people who choose to get involved, but as an attempt to empower people by putting scientific tools in their hands, it falls a bit short. This top-down approach contrasts with grassroots endeavors such as the maker movement, biohacking, etc., which are driven by users rather than experts, but again, these communities tend to be self-selecting and short on diversity.
 
More recently, new approaches have emerged that seek to address these inequities by more explicitly including the views of diverse, often marginalized communities. Different terminology has been used to describe these approaches in different contexts. These include ‘participatory design’, ‘co-design’, and ‘co-creation’. An example from citizen science is the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) project, based at UCL in London, which has the stated aim of being a “bottom-up practice that takes into account local needs, practices and culture and works with broad networks of people to design and build new devices and knowledge creation processes that can transform the world.” This approach seeks to be genuinely democratising, not by simply including citizens in data collection but by empowering them to achieve their own aims using the tools of science. Closer to home, the New Zealand Government’s Participatory Science Platform, has similar goals.
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It seems that the open movement and citizen science are both moving in the right direction. As librarians and information professionals we are used to asking ourselves, and our customers, whether we’re doing everything we can to provide them with access to the information they need, and tools to navigate the information landscape in a way that’s meaningful to them. If we go beyond that, continually reflecting and consulting on whether the ways we go about doing that are genuinely inclusive and open to all, or whether they contain hidden barriers that perpetuate current imbalances in information equity, then perhaps we can do our bit to correct those imbalances and move towards a fairer and more equitable society.

A few years back we started a project to upgrade all our public internet PCs at Wellington City Libraries, which were in various stages of decrepitude. The project was tricky due to our IT requirements, which made progress for everyone slow, and often a bit frustrating.
 
At one point in project, a senior manager turned to me and said, do you really need 120 PCs? Can’t people just use Wi-Fi?
 
The comment felt both frustrating and illuminating in equal measure. As librarians, we know the weight of the demand, the continual stream of people looking for access. We know the value that people place on the service, and the mounting frustration when things go wrong, in a world that expects us all to be online, all the time.
 
And yet for many New Zealanders, a lack of access to the internet, the lack of a device, is something that they can hardly conceive of at all.
 
In April this year, Wellington City Libraries provided 248,689 minutes of public internet access time on PCs
 
That’s over 4,000 hours.
 
10,900 individual sessions.
 
That’s not including our free public Wi-Fi.
 
That’s 4,000 hours of people who either don’t have a device to get online, or needed to do something online that couldn’t be done on the device they had.
 
Yes, we really do need 120 PCs.
 
And bear in mind that this is in Wellington, where we have one of the highest median household incomes in the country, and think about what that means for the rest of New Zealand.
 
Libraries are on the front line of the digital divide, and we’ve been there for the last 20 years.
 
We have been there through the closure of job seeker centres and internet cafes. Through the rise of the smart phone, eBooks, streaming. Through government initiatives to push transactions online. Through the closure of small regional government offices, and banks around the country.
 
And still people are coming.
 
Digital provides the mechanism for communication, connection, companionship, relationships, freedom of expression, and freedom of information.
 
There is the heartache of refugees connecting with families in the places they have fled from.
 
There is the disappointment and hope of people applying for jobs.
 
There is the joy of people finding that special niche of people online who share their passion for cosplay, or tatting, or heirloom tomatoes.
 
Connection and involvement in society, is such a human need.
 
It is easy to look at digital inclusivity in a transactional way. I need to transfer money to pay my rent. I need to apply for a job. I need to get a passport.
 
And these are all important. And, they are also only part of the picture.
 
Social inclusion is impossible without digital inclusion. This hasn’t always been the case, and even 20 years ago, the idea of access to the internet being a human right would have still seemed, if not laughable, at least highly dubious.
 
But that is now the position of the UN.
 
With so many of our connections and interactions moving online, we can’t deny that to be digitally excluded, is to be socially excluded.
 
Some of us may choose to digitally exclude ourselves. I’ve recently deleted Facebook, the mothership of social media. But that’s my choice. Should I want to go back online, I can. I still have email, Twitter, access to the internet. I have the key enablers: trust, motivation, ability and access.
 
So, whose role is it to build a digitally inclusive world?
 
The responsibilities are murky and there are a lot of players. Libraries have a mission that is compatible with digital inclusion, where we can make the argument for our involvement. But the demand, the need, is far greater that what we can supply.
 
Following COVID-19, the National Library received money under the NZ Libraries Partnership Programme to help the COVID-19 Recovery. The programme allowed libraries to employ staff to work in one of six areas, and one of those areas was digital inclusion.

Such was the need, that every library in the Wellington region hired a digital inclusion related role.
 
Why did it take a pandemic for the need to be funded? That money runs out on 30 June 2022. The need will not magically go away. 1 July 2022 will dawn, with tens of thousands of people across Aotearoa still being digitally excluded.
 
As with every tricky social issue, the factors that contribute to digital exclusion are complex.
 
But we have a network of groups, working in the community who are ready to help, who spend tireless hours applying for funding, to see it as their mission to do what they can.
 
My plea to the big players is this, think bigger. Digital inclusion may be a problem for the individual, but the causes, and many of the solutions, lie in valuing our people, and providing an environment in which they can thrive. That means funding, broadband rollout, digital initiatives in schools, teacher upskilling, and a level of household income that goes beyond subsistence and into living.
 
We can do better.
 
And if we want New Zealand to thrive digitally, we must.

What do you think is your greatest achievement throughout your co-founding and development of the Wright Family Foundation?
I could not name a greatest achievement but what I get most joy from are the literacy, music, and arts. Through our NZ Spelling Bee, Kids Lit Foundation, Summer Learning Journey, Virtuoso Strings, Arohanui Strings, and other programs we see children who perhaps do not have the ‘freedom’ to emote, thrive and become confident, competent beings. It does not get better than this.

Why is it important to you and the foundation to be involved with the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults?
The NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults inspires not only authors and illustrators but those who read, observe the power of writing, and become inspired in their own time to take those skills forward either for their benefit or the wider audience.
 
In your opinion, how do you think librarians and libraries can get more involved in early childhood life?
Librarians may take more time to read current books for children, thereby recommending, in a knowledgeable way, books for children. They might hold ‘reading circles’ for parents and pre-schoolers. Encourage early childhood teachers to bring the children on library trips.
 
What do you think libraries could be doing to more effectively in support reading for pleasure?
Create more comfortable spaces. Sofas, armchairs, coffee, or small café where people can quietly share their love of reading and books, and connect. Te Aka Mauri in Rotorua is an excellent example of a community space for the enjoyment of reading.
 
Why do you believe it is important for children to have a positive relationship with reading at an early age?
First comes reading with a parent followed by reading alongside a parent or family group. Sharing interpretations of stories and fostering imagination through eyes that see the world in possibilities. Imagination builds creativity.
 
What are your hopes and aspirations for the future of children literature and books?
My hopes for children’s literature are that myths and fairy tales, will continue to link the past to the present and create a strong moral compass. The strength of the writer is to inspire and challenge the child to view the world, its challenges, and possibilities, creating an individual call to action.
 
Do you have any inspiring words to share with the young people of New Zealand?
“The bird in the tree is never afraid of the branch breaking. She has more faith in her own wings, than in the branch”- Author unknown
 
Why do you think libraries, and information organizations (archives, museums, galleries) important to a country?
They bring people together in a collective space enabling the sharing of information, beauty, order, and importantly, close human connection.
 
What did it mean to you to be recognised with the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year’s Honours 2021?
It meant that the work we have been able to do was recognised as valuable to our country. It created a greater sense of responsibility to those we serve, a shared honour with those who support this work.
 
What are some of your favourite authors and books?

• Oscar Wilde
• Roald Dahl
• James Michener
• Paulo Coelho
• Markus Zusak

 
Do you have a favourite library you like to visit now?
Te Aka Mauri in Rotorua.
 
Did libraries support your development as a young reader – if so, what do you remember?
Yes, they did. We had lots of great books at home, but I also loved to walk the aisles of the local library, reading titles, wondering at the order, and taking books out. I was an avid reader who developed through stories a vivid imagination and my relentless optimism.
 
What is one of your favourite places in New Zealand?
Any forest, the ocean, places where nature reigns supreme.

First off, tell us why you wanted to be a judge?
I believe it’s crucial that any book awards for children and young adults should have librarian representation. We are on the ‘frontline’ and have unparalleled same-space access to the titles and the students. Being able to promote New Zealand literature within that dynamic is so important for our continued growth of literacy in our young people.
 
There were a ton of books entered in the 2021 awards. Take us through your process of how you balanced reading all of the books and also being a convener of judges.
Reading over 150 books, of different styles and genres, is difficult enough but you are also reading to judge, not just for enjoyment. That can cloud your decision sometimes as you may be reading different books from what you’re into, so you must shelve your preferences in favour of professional impartiality.
 
What do you think readers will take away from this year’s list of finalists?
This year a couple of themes that pop up are the environment and well-being. None of it is bashing the audience over the head though, it’s touched on lightly, or obliquely. The range of titles definitely contains something for everyone.
 
What experiences would you like to share with the readers of this article?
I have been lucky enough to have been a judge for two years and I believe the awards benefit from a steady turnover of judges. I would love to see the judges be used as part of the promotional angle for the awards, maybe also add a younger judge for the shortlist process! I was so lucky to be surrounded by passionate, intelligent judges, it made this such a fulfilling experience.
 
How do you think librarians and libraries can get more involved in early childhood life?
Librarians need to be proactive, more than ever. Sometimes by nature librarians are their own worst enemy, as they may be more comfortable letting people come to them, instead of raising elbows and pushing to the front. We must promote our awesomeness, and believe in the value we bring to our communities. We may have to ask ourselves ‘Is it us?’, so that we can figure out how libraries can draw people in, and keep them coming back.
 
What do you think libraries could be doing to be more effective in supporting reading for pleasure?
We need to show that we are taking an interest in what is interesting to our users! Know what book is next if they are reading Andy Griffiths, or Reina Telemeiger, all WITHOUT JUDGEMENT! I shamelessly suggest The Day My Bum Went Psycho a lot, because they will giggle, and then we’re in on the subversiveness together.
 
Why do you believe it is important for children to have a positive relationship with reading at an early age?
Reading is something that, regardless of status, is accessible to everyone. Children need to see us read, they need to hear us read, and they need to hear us talk about books, and libraries, as the magical escapes that they are. We need to promote what we love. 
 
What are your hopes and aspirations for the future of children literature and books?
Bravery from libraries, authors and publishers. No topic off limits, trust the reader in their need and want to explore. Illustrators are given more and more space.
 
Do you have any inspiring words to share with the young people of New Zealand that are thinking about writing a book?
I am honest with my students. I have great ideas but no follow-up, kind of like a firework, big bang and flash….then nothing! I tell them to write any idea down, save it, revisit regularly, leave it if it isn’t moving you forward.
 
What are you most looking forward to readers discovering through this year’s list of finalists?
There will be, as always, surprises but we can assure you that the judges left nothing on the table. I look forward to people revisiting the winners, hoping they will see what the judges saw.

If not, then that’s the great thing about books, we may pick up the same title, but everybody reads a different book.

So, why is being appointed to the ReadNZ Te Pou Muramura Board important to you?
I applied for the board role with Read NZ Te Pou Muramura as I was really drawn to their mission to have more New Zealanders reading more books.  I also knew about Writers in Schools which I thought was a great programme. I felt that there were a lot of ideas that we could share between the library sector and Read NZ Te Pou Muramura. And it is always really rewarding to sit on boards.

What do you hope to achieve with your appointment?
I would love to see ReadNZ Te Pou Muramura extend the reach of what they do, working side by side with libraries. We both have such strong missions around the value of reading and the opportunities, escapes, and pleasure that reading brings. Because Read NZ Te Pou Muramura is a charitable trust, they have opportunity to apply for funding that libraries often can’t, so there’s an opportunity to do different kinds of initiatives that libraries might otherwise have trouble getting funding for. I hope I can help bridge that gap so together we can all cover more ground.
 
Why is reading and literacy throughout New Zealand important?
Literacy is a building block for so many other opportunities in life. Without it, it’s difficult to truly participate in society. I’m watching my six-year old in her learning to read journey, and it’s so exciting – for her and me!
 
What is your hope for the future of New Zealand, literacy, and reading for pleasure?
I would love to see an explosion of New Zealand authors writing for kids and young people right across every age group, and strong support for teachers to teach New Zealand content that reflects the kids in their class.  In a 2018 report, 27% of kids in year eight disagreed with the statement “the things we read in class are about people like me and my family/whānau”. If we want kids to love reading, they have to be able to see their culture, language, and identity reflected in what they read.
 
Who are some of your favourite New Zealand based authors?
Most of my favorite New Zealand authors are poets! Bill Manhire is one of my favourite authors. I met him once when I was doing my Masters, and it’s the only time I’ve been legitimately star struck.
 
Recommend a book!
I can’t choose one!  But I have a huge soft spot for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
 
Why are libraries important to a country?
Libraries play a huge and often unrecognized role in communities, not just in terms of reading and knowledge, but in community building and social connection. We’ve really seen that with the closure of our central library here in Wellington. It’s been quite amazing for people to realise the many roles a library plays in everyday life, for a whole range of people. 
 
Thank you Laurinda for sitting down with us and discussing your thoughts on your new role at ReadNZ Te Pou Muramura, and the role of books, literacy, and libraries within New Zealand.