An award winning Relief
Island Bay resident Anna Taylor is the winner of this year’s Best First Book Award for her collection of short stories Relief.
“I thought ‘that’s me out of the running’, so I was really surprised and amazed when they told me I’d won,” says Taylor.
The New Zealand Society of Authors, as part of the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards, announced her book Relief as this year’s best new work of fiction.
The judges summarised Taylor’s work as, “A powerful collection that has at least one memorable image or sentence on every page”.
Taylor, who attended Wellington Girls and later Wellington High, explains: “I started by exploring weakness and how people struggle with their lives and each other. It can be bleak, but the humour breaks it up”.
The 221 page book contains eleven stories, nine of which Taylor wrote while studying creative writing at Victoria University, which she finished three years ago.
“The stories are similar to the MA creative writing manuscript. The course starts with a story of childhood, and ends on childhood; that is mirrored in the book.”
It took three years to complete the book, and she used the view of Island Bay out her window for inspiration.
“I would spend days staring out the window to empty my mind out before ideas and creativity could rise to the surface,” Taylor says.
The 2010 NZ Post Book Award finalists have just been announced, and this year there are 16 of them as opposed to 26 in previous years.
Wellingtonian and first time novelist Alison Wong is a finalist for her book As the Earth Turns Silver in the fiction category shortlist, alongside award-winning authors Fiona Farrell, and Owen Marshall.
The winners will be announced on August 27
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