The prize no one was quite good enough to win

First, the bad news. There will be no 2024 Allen & Unwin Commercial Fiction Prize. We received a lot of entries. Some were pretty good, some were works in progress, and others were so nearly ‘it’, and by ‘it’, I mean the novel that all seven judges fell in love with and were desperate to publish and name the third winner of the prize.
Our inaugural winner was Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro in 2022 and The Call by Gavin Strawhan won last year. Both those novels were the unanimous pick of the judging panel. Both have gone on to be critical and commercial successes, selling extremely strongly in both New Zealand and Australia (and with French rights sold for Josie’s novel). Josie has sold some 14,000 copies of her novel across all formats while Gavin’s is nearing 10,000 copies, only seven months since publication. Allen & Unwin has signed both Josie and Gavin for their latest novels, to be published next year.
But – much like you can’t fake attraction for very long – the judges all knew in our bones this year that in among the 60-odd entries we hadn’t found a novel that we knew was the winner. There was one that we so wanted to give it to, but it just wasn’t quite there.
What was missing, generally? A big one was character development; another, undercooked plots. A few had killer plots but the writing didn’t stack up. Some were clearly early drafts (or only drafts) while others lacked any emotional pull. I’m not aiming to criticise — writing a novel is one of the hardest things anyone could do, and it’s for that reason that we are very careful about what we take on. Outside the prize, we have published several other local novels, and they have all sold strongly and been well received — and just last week we signed a fantastic debut novel, by the International Institute of Modern Letters graduate Gina Butson.
Publishers don’t publish into a vacuum. We rely on booksellers to get behind a novel (speaking of which, a special shoutout to Joan Mackenzie at Whitcoulls and Carole Beu at The Women’s Bookshop for absolutely championing Josie’s novel, and to Sophie Wilton from Whitcoulls and the whole crime-writing community for embracing Gavin’s story so wholeheartedly). For the prize to succeed long-term, it’s important booksellers can be confident any novel that wins is going to sell, and sell strongly.
When we first conceived the prize, in 2021, we deliberately named it the Allen & Unwin Commercial Fiction Prize, because we wanted to make clear our intention to publish novels that people loved reading.  At that time, New Zealand fiction was in the doldrums — in 2021, local fiction made up only five percent of the total market, according to Nielsen BookScan. Happily, things have improved markedly since then. Last year was a bumper year for local fiction, with marquee names such as Eleanor Catton, Catherine Chidgey, Nicky Pellegrino and Emily Perkins (though she is technically published by Bloomsbury out of the UK) leading the charge, with a stack of promising debuts from Airana Ngarewa, Megan Nicol Reed, Anne Tiernan, Claire Baylis and Josie Shapiro, all of whom have sold more than 5000 copies of their novels, a vast improvement from 2021, when most New Zealand novelists would struggle to sell more than a couple of thousand copies.
We still want to publish novels people want to read — in good numbers — but on reflection, it may have been slightly confusing to use the word ‘commercial’ in the prize’s name. I can think of dozens of wonderful literary New Zealand novels published in the past few years that would have romped in and won our prize if they’d been an entrant this year. A quick glance at our submissions inbox, where we ask aspiring authors to classify their genre, shows that most budding authors see their novels as literary, even when they’re not.
So, labels be damned — popular, literary, crime, history, romantasy — if you think you have a propulsive, well-written book that deserves to be published and that will see you become the next winner of the Allen & Unwin Fiction Prize and pocket a very nice $10,000 advance plus contract, then send in your masterpiece. Entries have opened today (October 7), and close on March 31, 2025.
Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro, winner of the 2022 Allen & Unwin fiction prize, and The Call by Gavin Strawhan, winner of last year’s prize, are available in bookstores nationwide. A French edition of Shapiro’s novel A perdre haleine (Romans étrangers) has received a rave review in Slate: “L’autrice ne cesse de souligner l’importance des rencontres, heureuses ou malheureuses, et donc la nécessité de savoir –bien– s’entourer. Pour réussir sa carrière d’athlète comme pour avancer dans la vie.“