From Victoria University Press:

It is with great sadness that Victoria University Press wishes to advise that Nigel Cox passed away early Friday morning 28 July 2006.

One of New Zealand’s best writers, Nigel was recognised at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards on Monday evening when his novel “Responsibility” was named a runner-up for the Fiction Award. Nigel’s eloquent and moving acceptance speech was met with a standing ovation from his family, friends and colleagues in the writing, publishing and bookselling community.

Author of five published novels, “Waiting for Einstein”, “Dirty Work”, “Skylark Lounge”, “Tarzan Presley” and “Responsibility”, Nigel had recently completed a wonderful new book called “The Cowboy Dog” which Victoria University Press are proud to publish later in the year. 

Nigel is survived by his wife Susanna Andrew and their children, Kate, Andrew-Jack and Frank. Nigel’s funeral will be held at 2pm on Monday 31 July at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Brougham St. Mt Victoria, Wellington. In lieu of flowers donations can be made to the “Nigel Cox’s Children’s Trust” c/- Unity Books, 57 Willis St. Wellington and Unity Books, 19 High St. Auckland. 

Nigel has been a great friend to all of us at Victoria University Press and we will miss him more than words can say.

Fergus Barrowman, Sue Brown, Craig Gamble, Heather McKenzie.

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Feathers are getting ruffled across the ditch by the arrival of the über-sales-tracker, BookScan.

BookScan has already made a huge impact in the US and UK, because it allows booksellers to see immediately what’s hot and what’s not.

The downside, according to some in the book trade, is that the short-term focus of BookScan statistics distorts the market. It boosts fast-selling mass-market books but damages ‘literary’ titles, which tend to rely on slow, sustained sales.

If a bookseller sees that Jenny Pattrick is going through the roof but Emily Perkins is going through the floor, so the theory goes, the bookseller will immediately attempt to hitch a ride on the Pattrick bandwagon by promoting Pattrick’s books and dropping Perkins.

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Today's number is '58'.

As in, '58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school'.

That, and other fascinating book statistics, can be found here.

And yes, this is possibly the shortest article ever published on LeafSalon. Because I'm literally lost for words.

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Fans of Albert Wendt will be pleased to know that Shirley Horrocks' documentary The New Oceania is screening this Saturday on TV One at 9.50pm.

Horrocks is the film-maker behind documentaries on Allen Curnow, Len Lye and Marti Friedlander. For The New Oceania she travelled with Wendt to Samoa and spoke to his friends and family. She's also pulled together a whole raft of archival footage and interviews, plus samples of his poetry and fiction, and a dramatisation of his playwriting. The resulting film garnered rave reviews at the Film Festival back in July.

The New Oceania was filmed in Samoa (Wendt’s birthplace), New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii and, as well as following Wendt’s life and career, it’s a showcase for Pacific creativity across the full range of the arts: dance troupe Black Grace and hiphop artists Tha Feelstyle also feature.

It's the best excuse to stay in on a Saturday night that we've heard for a long time.

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Back to NZ Book Month. There’s been a great response to the ‘Six Pack’ competition and now is time to read and vote, people. The basic website is now up and running, with all the extracts from the entries received so far. You can take part in the people’s vote, which will see one lucky author into the finalists’ arena and pocketing $5,000. Go here and read.

In case you’re not aware of NZ Book Month, it’s a new initiative being taken by the entire NZ publishing community. The aim is simple: to get more New Zealanders reading more NZ writing. Phil Twyford is heading the team that’s co-ordinating these efforts. Phil’s background is CEO of Oxfam NZ, (he was big internationally too, check the bio) and he’s currently the Labour candidate for the North Shore.

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The third issue of Snorkel, the literary magazine for New Zealanders and Australians, is now online. Contributors include Bob Orr, Elizabeth Smither, Noel Rowe, Kate De Goldi and David Prater.

Snorkel is published twice yearly, with Snorkel #4 due for launch in October 2006. The editor is Cath Vidler, whose poems have appeared in Sport, Turbine, Cordite, Alba, Trout and Tinfish.

Incidentally, submissions to Snorkel can be sent by email. Only previously unpublished work is considered, but you can send up to five poems and/or two prose pieces to snorkel@snorkel.org.au. Submissions to Snorkel #4 close on 15 August 2006.

PS 'Angry snorkel materialize'? It's an anagram of 'snorkel literary magazine', and featured in a strange poem on Snorkel's 'About us' page …

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A final couple of offerings from the Obanites (there's a Southland sleepover joke in there somewhere). Richard Reeve gives us his take on the symposium, (that's him on the left at the Ulva Island Ferry with Bronwyn Lloyd (PhD student with Michele and art historian), Paula Green, Lisa Williams (graphic designer), Michele Leggott and Tusiata Avia – thanks again to Alison Hunt for the photo). There's a sleek surprise from Ms Bluff herself to wind it all up. And don't forget to browse the online anthology. But now, Richard:

Oban 2006 – (Cilla originally called it the Bluff Bunfight), certainly exceeded my expectations. I came away with the distinct impression that many New Zealand poets were much more self-collected than I’d given them credit for, superficially a comment on my own lack of generosity perhaps, but a statement too of the profoundly generative atmosphere of this festival, exhaustively organised by David Howard and Michele Leggott. I ate fat with Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Emma Neale and Martin Edmond, drank coffee with Tusiata Avia, got drunk with John Dolan, Jeanne Bernhardt, Kay Cooke and Therese Lloyd, helped Michele Leggott around Rakiura’s Ulva Island with its marauding wekas and fake Elephant seal, smoked cigarettes with Cilla, discussed Roman murder with Bernadette, and felt generally liked and appreciated despite my bad breath, irrepressible acne and awkwardness.

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Well, lucky readers, first up this week, we have a special report on Bluff 06 from some of those who were there. There’s lots to read, from Paula Green and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. So without further ado, I’ll let Cilla McQueen, one of the main organisers with David Howard, Brian Flaherty and Michele Leggott, give the intro – but not without a rousing cheer to all of the above for putting in a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears to achieve what was, by all accounts, a magnificent literary event that was also a bit of a life-changer for many. Now. Over to you, Cilla:

In Bluff's Te Rau Aroha Marae (gloriously pictured, at dawn, with special thanks to Alison Hunt) the spectral art works created by Cliff Whiting express the vibrant spirit of southern Maori ancestors and legend. From April 21-24, the wharenui's finely-crafted walls absorbed readings, meditations and dissertations by a couple of dozen leading New Zealand poets and academics who met here for the symposium entitled Bluff 06.

Over four days of readings, launches and discussion in Bluff and Rakiura, poetry was variously the subject and the means of discussion and communication of new work and thinking. Writers put faces to names, heard the voices of poetry in practice, celebrated the spirituality of language, “the controlled insinuative inferences expelled by the body's muscles in the spoken word.” (Tuwhare.)

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The Scottish-born writer Dame Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, has died in Tuscany.

By the time of her death at 88, she'd written more than 20 books. Her spare prose and finely crafted humour found favour with both literary judges and the reading public: she won numerous awards including the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992, and the British Literature Prize in 1997.

In a retrospective in The Observer, fellow Scots novellist Ruaridh Nicholl says:

In that way of Robert Louis Stevenson and James Hogg, it's impossible to imagine Scotland without her. The mirrors these writers held up were so flawless that they defined a nation.

Incidentally, Spark reviewed and praised Maurice Shadbolt's first book, the 1959 collection of stories called The New Zealanders. Spark's review gave Shadbolt valuable publicity in Britain, in contrast to the generally negative response he received in New Zealand.

The Scotsman obit is here and the New York Times tribute is here.

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Thought we’d do a quick run-through of the weekend ahead on t'wireless with regard to NZ books and writers. There’s quite a bit, starting with tomorrow morning’s Books on Saturday with Kim Hill. Writers interviewed will be John Smythe, (wrote Downstage Upfront - the first 40 years of New Zealand's longest running professional theatre, VUP), Graham Reid ( Postcards From Elsewhere: Odd Destinations and Unusual, Random House), and Bernadette Hall ( Like Love Poems: Selected Poems' by Joanna Margaret Paul, VUP). This is a nice list … A friend nicked the latter off me in my own kitchen, and is currently deeply involved in it; she WILL review it shortly.

There’ll also be one Moira Smith on the show, who, according to the NatRad website, ‘has a PhD in folklore from Indiana University. She is the author of studies of New Zealand capping festivals, on the social reception of humour, and on the European witch-hunts, and has just completed a residency at the Stout Research Centre completing a book-length study of practical jokes in New Zealand and the United States.’ Nice job if you can get it. And there's more…

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Canterbury University Press are hoping to publish an anthology in 2007 about Banks Peninsula and are looking for submissions of poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction). Editors Coral Atkinson and David Gregory are also looking for extracts from archival letters and diaries, anything really that will celebrate the spirit of the Peninsula. And what’s not to like? I’ll never forget a long weekend Chris and I spent driving around, staying at ‘The Giant’s House’ with extraordinary, prolific, eccentric artist Josie Martin (one of her latest paintings, Pourquoi Pas, right), and scoffing superb food and great wine at French Farm. Bliss. We were looking at real estate after two days.

Anyway, contact Coral on atkinsoc@ihug.co.nz or David on david.j.gregory@xtra.co.nz for detailed guidelines and a submission form. If you don’t have access to email, send an SSAE to Coral Atkinson, 80 Main Road, Governors Bay, Lyttelton RD1 and mark it ‘Anthology Guidelines’.

I’ll bet that mad bunch from Lyttleton, the Catalyst crew, will be rolling their sleeves up for this one. We’ve just received their latest journal (Vol 4) which is admittedly a few months old now, but really good and will stand the test of time on any bookshelf.

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For those who like their literature online, there’s plenty out there. Here’s a finished anthology, and one that’s just starting:

Best New Zealand Poems, edited by ex-pat Andrew Johnston (slumming it in Paris) has just been loaded up on the IIML website. There are 25 poems, from the likes of Michele Amas, James Brown, Jenny Bornholdt, Anne Kennedy, Brian Turner, and Ian Wedde. And with subject matter ranging from sausage rolls to saris, there something for everyone. Andrew Johnston is working in Paris as an editor for the International Herald Tribune. He has a poetry blog, and likes to keep his hand in on the writing side too.

The start-up is being put together by Mark Young, who was quite The Man here in the sixties (that's him on the right, above, with James K Baxter left, and David Mitchell in The Tie). He and a bad gang of poets and artists used to hang out at the Barry Lett Gallery declaiming their work, drinking Henderson Valley red wine and generally being extremely intellectual and probably rather rowdy. He left the country in 1969 for Australia and hasn’t come back. But the news is now that Mark’s doing an e-zine called Otoliths.

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In the wake of the announcement of NZ Book Month at the end of last year, things are starting to happen, and it’s all looking good for the September/October literary blow-out. Book Month is a new intiative from Booksellers NZ, and the book industry in general, which aims to get more NZers reading more NZ writers, something LeafSalon is also quite keen on. They’ve got Phil Twyford, ex-Oxfam CEO and current Labour candidate for the North Shore on the go organising it all.

The first thing he’s up to is a call for submissions for The Gift Book, a whole new concept in publishing. It will be a book of six pieces of writing from across all genres that will showcase NZ writing. The final six will be selected from a shortlist of up to 25 that will be chosen by a panel of publishers and retailers. NZ readers will choose one of the final six by reading and voting for the shortlisted works online. The other five will be selected by a ‘jury of experts’. Oh, and the six finalists all get five grand each.

The lucky punters will be announced at a gala event in Auckland on September 16, when the book is unveiled. Once it’s all published and everything, (a first print run of 50,000 will be bankrolled by the book trade and other interested parties) The Gift Book will be literally gifted to schools and libraries all over the country and you’ll be able to buy it from a retailer near you for the measly sum of five bucks. We think it’s a pretty damn nice idea really.

Download your form here and rattle your dags for good of the nation – the deadline is May 5.

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The news du jour is all about Margaret Mahy winning the 2006 Hans Christian Andersen Author Award. This biennial prize is pretty much on the level of the Nobel, but it’s for childrens’ literature and really, really, like, huge out there in the whole entire world. And it makes Margaret Mahy only the second Australiasian writer to win the award in the 50 years since its inception.

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Well, it’s official. The extra-mural activity that Buddle Finlay Fellow Emily Perkins is going to be indulging in has been revealed as the presenter of ‘The Book Show’, a new weekly television series airing on TV One this winter.

The TVNZ media release says it will be ‘an entertaining part-studio, part-documentary half-hour programme’ featuring ‘a changeable panel of book-lovers and will profile a series of New Zealand writers, interviewed on their home patches by former Listener editor Finlay Macdonald … Producer Colin Hogg says the new series aims is to take the concept of a book show to a new level – making it as entertaining as it is informative, celebrating reading as much as writing.’

This will be the first attempt at a lit-show since ‘Bookenz’, hosted by Kate De Goldi with Mark Crysell as field reporter. As the IIML newsletter said ‘we hope that the programme will have a bit more grunt than the disappointing books segment of TV3's ‘Campbell Live’ or the worryingly many newspaper and magazine books pages which seem mainly to plug the latest best-selling titles from multinational publishers.’ Quite.

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