The quiz will be held simultaneously at our 4 branches (depending on entries).

Teams of four (or less) will compete to be named the Libraries Tararua Children’s Book
Awards District Champions. The winners will hold the trophy for a year, plus be awarded a prize.
The highest scoring team in each of the other towns will receive a small prize too.

If you’d like to register a team (of up to 4 children), print and use the entry form below or email library@tararuadc.govt.nz with the name of your team and contact details of an adult (homeschoolers can also enter). Entries close 22 September. 

a cape of dappled feathers

draped on our mountain

© Joy Bell

My soul glazes the shot glass,

a shimmer

too thin to hold,

yet if you tilt it toward the glow,

you’ll see rainbow freckles,

memories dissolving

into the neon glow.

But light fades,

colours drain,

I slip back

into the clear silence.

They only see the glass,

NEVER ME.

last drop

clinging,

trembling pearl,

proof

I was ever here.

© Nathan Kirby

First, thank you to everyone who submitted a poem or haiku. We were very pleased with the number of entries received, and appreciate the effort put forth into producing some excellent quality poetry. Both winners will receive a Prezzy Card to spend on what they wish.

Secondly, a big thank you to both of our judges, Fiona Farrell and Leika McIver. We appreciate the careful thought you put towards choosing our winners.

WINNER OF THE OPEN CATEGORY

This year, we were extremely honoured to have Fiona Farrell as the judge for our open category. Fiona Farrell is a frequent guest at festivals in New Zealand, and has also appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival, Salisbury UK Festival and the Adelaide Festival.

She has held residencies in France (1995 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton) and Ireland (2006 Rathcoola Residency). Fiona was the 2011 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. In 2007 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours List 2012.

In 2013, Farrell received Creative New Zealand’s premier award, the Michael King Fellowship, to write twin volumes, one fiction, one non-fiction, prompted by the Christchurch earthquakes and the reconstruction of the city. The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, was shortlisted for the non-fiction section in the 2016 Ockham NZ Book Awards while its fictional twin, Decline and Fall on Savage Street was published to critical acclaim in 2017 and received that year’s NZSA Heritage Book Award for fiction. Together, the books have been described as ‘a wonderful piece of art.’

In 2023, Fiona Farrell became a Fellow of the Academy of New Zealand Literature. In an Appreciation composed for this event, author and critic Paul Little wrote, ‘Across the years of Fiona Farrell’s work, I’ve found an almost perfect fit between what I hope to find in any writing — surprise, excitement, daring, perspective, splendour — and what she produces reliably time after time. https://fionafarrell.com/

Judge’s comments:

The 31 poems submitted for this competition included an extraordinary variety of style and subject matter. So many lines leapt from the page.

The tenderness and poignant beauty of a long marriage, captured in: 

‘Luke wheels his frail goddess

in the chariot of steel…’

Or the lament of:

“And there’s one baby no longer floating,

Our niece delivered today, her daughter still born.’

Or the powerful directness of:

‘my dad never told me

why he wanted so many children

when he wasn’t really a dad to any of us.’

Or the drumbeat of repetition in ‘What happens to the child’ that builds to the climactic:

‘What happens to the child

Who learns to fight.’

Or the haunting imagery of:

‘A mist that rolls

And leaves me

Waiting.

I am the mist and the lawnmower. ‘

Or the compressed perfection of an elegy on the deaths of cats:

‘Gone one by one, they shed

Their little lives.’

Or the originality with which death is described in

‘I’m on the 4.19 to Pluto

I look down at my body

I am not there

I am embraced

in light

and cleared for take-off.’

Or the use of traditional poetic forms to make contemporary observations. A pantoum that plays with collective nouns, for example, to describe children at  a beach:

‘They peer in to rock pools.

a squabble of seagulls

What do you see? Sneer of crabs. Netful of limpets.’

Or a ballad catching a memory of children watching soldiers pass by:

‘When I look back upon that scene

I do much more than ponder.

To be spared to write of such fearful times

Is to me a wonder.’

Or a sonnet that plays with the form before the final couplet:  

‘But now I’ve lost my effing train of thought.

Let’s wind this doggerel up. ’Twas all for naught.’

But in this selection, three poems stood out. I found it difficult to choose which I would place first. Each had some special quality.

In ‘The Space Between’, an intense  moment between two people and the context of their encounter is described using language as Emily Dickinson advised: the poet ‘Tells it slant.’

‘…and if we appealed to the under-

breath tattles of this town, we would be something like

beasts in your spray-tanned suburbia…’

In ‘When authors sing rivers after Elif Shafak’, ancient Mespotamia, modern war,  poetry, sheep’s wool, thoughts on human existence and love are woven together in the most accomplished and beautiful fashion. 

…My familiar ( a term I stole

from The Book of Dust) is curled beside me,

made of water too, and softest fur

I am allowed to run my fingers through. I know of

of no privilege unbounded as this..’

And in Thoughts from the Nursery, a camellia becomes the centre of attention, the poet’s eye detecting in its orderly beauty a profound meaning:

‘And this is truth

that flowers grown not just to bloom

or to be seen, but life, and green,

experience the world, and

at their own pace, to unfurl. ‘ 

Any one of these three poems would be a worthy winner, and eminently publishable. But since I must choose just one, I choose Thoughts from a Nursery as the first place winner in this year’s competition.

My congratulations to the poet! Fiona Farrell

WINNER OF THE HAIKU CATEGORY

Judged by published poet, Leika McIver, the winner is ‘old photo albums’.

Old photo albums

turning the page

into my childhood

This haiku evokes a strong feeling of nostalgia and has multiple meanings upon reading it again. As you would turn the pages of a photo album to look at it, but it gives the feeling the page itself is turning into the author – or readers childhood. Congratulations to the poet.

I would also like to give a special mention to ‘Landlord’s rhubarb plant,’ and ’dawn rains.’

blue morning blisters dotting the sky, alchemic in the space between you and yesterday.

bearing the ritual spectacle is that little moment in which I was dead over and over again

beneath the sun’s flushed retraction. and if we appealed to the under-

breath tattles of this town, we would be something like

beasts in your spray-tanned suburbia. dare for a minute—dare to rub cavities off your

bared teeth like a mud smudge on milky linoleum.

because there was us in the backwoods, bark-carving initials like the kids on screen

because there was us even though your fingers get stuck in my hair

because there was us before I was the

brown girl your mother designated her curled lip to

because there was us hours ago, staining your lawn like chemical spills. the grass

blades, newly manicured, attempting to break the skin on our backs as our

breath met halfway, somewhere in the space between our foreheads and my

black birds’ machined wings of warning

batting against the floor of my skull

but still,                           I let them beat.

© Ocean Jade

turning the page

into my childhood

© Allie Lundon

In thoughtless play I used to pluck

unripe camellias from the tree

peel origami petals back

with no concern for their Fibonacci

and wondered why they didn’t bloom

with tutu petals like the rest

but clung stubborn to the heart

and didn’t want to part

but browned, and tore like paper sheaves

and pined for crisp duvets of leaves.

If I had known that growth cannot

be forced upon a bud, or risk its rot

that even from one tree, a nursery,

each pocket of potential has its clock

and ripens to thermometer unseen

a summer blush that can’t be rushed

by daylight savings, guilt, or craving

for new faces to display and grace our vases

and on that grey timeline, droop

at rates deemed by their reaper, and so flick

upon the nest of molding heads that group

around the roots

And this is truth

that flowers grow not just to bloom

or to be seen, but live, and green,

experience the world, and

at their own pace, to unfurl.

© Loredana Podolska-Kint