I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since I posted. There are reasons however, the most obvious of which is the fact that our lives (all five of us, aged 4 to 40-odd) are in carefully frenzied, quietly mad turmoil. Because in just a few short weeks we’re moving to Sydney. The least palatable is that I've been blocked, blocked – unable, in my Book Month burn-out to even read a proper NZ book.

Hence the signage – after much mulling over, we’ve decided that the LeafSalon torch must be handed on. So come on: who’s up for it? You get a fully working website with a well-known name that’s (we like to think) synonymous with good, controversial literary opinion and chat, lots of potential for advertising should you care to make a spot of dosh on the side, and a jolly good platform for a taunting rant whenever you desire. Obviously the requirements are that you need to be able to blog in helpful and chatty kind of way, and you must love NZ literature. There’ll be a nominal sum to pay, of course – it’s not free! Email me to discuss further.

So – what finally hauled me from my cupboard-clearing frenzy? Last week’s news of the shortlist for the $65,000 Prize in Modern Letters was excellent enough to do it, but I was head-down, bum-up in the worst and biggest storage space in the house. I raised a glass to all of you though (albeit with cobwebs in my hair) – well done, Michele Amas, David Beach, Mary McCallum, Jo Randerson, Anna Sanderson and Louise Wareham Leonard. Two of these I reviewed at the same time a while back, and they remain two of the best books I’ve read this year. Have to wait until March 8 next year to see who gets the cigar.

The judges for the PML were Guy Somerset, Elizabeth Alley, and Damien Wilkins. As a writer yourself it would be a bit on the nose to be giving away all that lovely dosh, so it must be lovely that Damien has just scored the really big kahuna: NZ’s newest international fellowship, the very first New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize.

This was the thing that very, very nearly got me sitting at my monitor: at $100K it’s a whopper and Damien must be hooting. As am I, because his work in the last year has been outstanding. The Fainter was not my favourite book of the year, but it revels in a second read, especially after his illuminating comments about why the main character was ‘faint’. Following swiftly on from The Fainter, his book of short stories, For Everyone Concerned was brilliant. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with in Menton. What a well deserved tonic – well done too to NZ Post and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Trust for providing such delectable fiscal and environmental encouragement to the cream of our talent – we’ll nail that bloody Booker yet.

Apparently the New Zealand Society of Authors has recently found that the annual mean income of a New Zealand author falls a whopping $7K short of the NZ minimum wage of $23,400. How sad is that? Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Trust Richard Cathie says ‘We expect to be able to really strengthen New Zealand’s body of literary work and raise the profile of New Zealand authors around the world with this prize.’ The only shame is we can't do it ten at a time.

But to continue the struggle – the final straw that washed away my blockage, if I may use a medical term, was the arrival in my letterbox of a nicely fat book with ‘Nigel Cox’ at the top on the cover. As my slightly manic struggle to get the wrapper off (a book’s arrival is always exciting) showed me a glimpse of this name I stopped with a pang. I had just been reading Book Council CEO Noel Murphy’s blog on NZ Book Month, and he asks us at the end which book he should read, from a short list which includes Cowboy Dog. I immediately emailed him and told him, ‘Nigel Cox was a genius and it's the greatest tragedy in NZ literature that we lost him’.

Phone Home Berlin, Collected Non-fiction is a bunch of writing which Nigel, his wife Susanna and his best mate and publisher Fergus Barrowman planned before his death. It includes some previously published work, essays, the brilliant interview with Damien Wilkins, the keynote address from Going West a couple of years ago, a short story and a few surprise poems. Plus a whole bunch of diary entries from when he and his family were in Berlin; these are intimate and real. There are some other gems written from Berlin, including a travel story (the family went to Sharm-el-Sheik in the Sinai) plus a fantastic piece about the birth of his third child – all kids love their birth stories.

The collection does not include what Nigel humourously called his ‘vapour novels’ in the second to last piece of the book entitled heartbreakingly ‘What I would have written’. What he would have written. Here I would like to include a long string of bitter swearing, in fact I just did, loudly. Anyway, best pop out and get this – snatch it up, and if you’ve missed any of his novels, get those too, all of them. I’m savouring the fact that I still haven’t read his first two. Saving them.

Because it’s like Nigel says on page 70, ‘It’s not just individual words, it’s words working together, they make your brain go round. Language, it’s what I swim in, it’s what is on everything, it’s what holds everything, it’s what makes everything sing…’. And his writing has always made me feel that. It’s a strange combination of serious madness combined with a sometimes unbearably lovely way of putting words together which has a humanising effect that should be sought out.

And now the Montanas have said they won’t ever again (after this year’s Janet Frame novel) be including posthumous work. Hmm…

Don’t forget to line-up, all you LeafSalon hopefuls. Later.