Montana Book Awards

May I begin by greeting everyone in the languages of the realm of New Zealand, in English, Māori, Cook Island Māori, Niuean, Tokelauan and New Zealand Sign Language.

Greetings, Kia Ora, Kia Orana, Fakalofa Lahi Atu, Taloha Ni - and as it is evening [sign].

May I then specifically greet you: Hon Christopher Finlayson, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage; Alastair Carruthers, Chair of Creative New Zealand; Glen Candy, Sponsorship Manager, Pernod Ricard (Montana); and Hamish Wright and Lincoln Gould - Chair and CEO respectively of Booksellers New Zealand.  I would also like to greet this year’s Judges, Dr Mark Williams, Jane Westaway, and Margo White; Distinguished Guests otherwise; writers and readers; ladies and gentlemen.

I am delighted to be present tonight at the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards even if it has had to be at the cost of seeking leave not to be present at the monthly meeting of a hugely interesting book club of which I am a founding and continuing member.

It is a fine thing to celebrate the work of some of New Zealand’s best writers, and to recognise the immense contribution they make to our country’s intellectual and artistic life.

Rudyard Kipling once famously described words as the most powerful drug used by mankind.  This is an interesting concept, particularly when it is considered that the history of mankind reflects a vast number of authors, as well as the other side of the author’s coin - readers.

It is true, however, that writers as a group may appear a somewhat unusual species, often engaged in a lifestyle that would not necessarily be recommended or approved of by health promotion agencies.

I am referring, of course, to the huge demands that writing can place on an individual, both physically and mentally, as well as on their families and friends.

Serious writing requires writers to inhabit an outsider’s zone-and to commit very often to a solitary life, where ideas and imagination can reign.

Working single-handedly on a project, sometimes for years on end, is not an unusual feature of a writer’s life.

Family life, children, friends, relations, and regular workaday pursuits, can all take a back seat when a writer is in the grip of the big, great idea, and with the urge to produce the story.

Quaint concepts like a consistent income, social contact, weekends, and even regular hours, may well go out the window with someone who embraces the occupation of book writing that John Steinbeck once described as making horse racing seem like a solid and stable business.

And, after all the hard work, the work produced lands in the sometimes ungracious hands of the writer’s “evil twin”-the reader.

Picking up a book that is new to us is often, in the beginning anyway, an exercise in selfishness. We come at a new book tentatively, from a ‘what’s in it for me?’ angle.

We hope that the flat, rigid, bound collection of papers that is a book will transform itself into something else, and take us with it.

We hope that we will end up in a world within a world, that we will find words that excite, challenge, explain and even comfort, us. We hope for this because, if we are avid readers, it will have happened to us before.

From somewhere inside them, unlike the rest of us, the best writers have the means and wherewithal to make that happen.

Janet Frame, one of this country’s greatest writers, described the process in this way: “Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land-it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

Writers recognise that if writing did not absorb us there would be no reason to bother and as readers, we are grateful they do bother.

Writing and books have a unique ability to increase understanding, not only of ourselves but also of our communities, both locally and internationally and in the past, present and future.

That is why writers and books are important and why they will remain essential.

Over the past few years a brightly coloured, rhyming poster has appeared in a number of New Zealand libraries and schools. Based loosely on the words of Dr Seuss in his book I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, and aimed at encouraging young people to read, the poster promised children that “the more they read, the more they’d know, and the more they’d know, the smarter they’d grow.”  To this I would like to add the phrase:- “and the better they’d understand.”

As a lifelong reader, I congratulate our writers and thank them for their work and their inspiration.

From the number of writers, publishers and readers here tonight, it would seem that appreciation of a story made from well-crafted words remains strong.  With a rough allusion to Mark Twain I am very pleased to say in conclusion that it would appear that news of the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated!

I would thus like to close in our country’s first language, Maōri, offering everyone greetings and wishing everyonel good health and fortitude in your endeavours. 

No reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora, kia kaha, tēnā koutou katoa.