Nigel Cox Award
Steven Braunias is the recipient of one of the two Nigel Cox Awards given out over the Auckland Writers Festival this weekend. The second award is yet to be announced.
At the opening night of the festival Nic Low coined a new word – fraudelescense to describe the luminous quality of feeling like a fraud.
Steve Braunias is a fraudelescent detector but there is another new word in that sentence.
The word Braunias has become a byline for brilliant totally bipartisan reporting.
In James Wood’s marvellous memoir of his life as a book critic he says “In ordinary life we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography”.
Braunias looks and looks and then he writes. He’s a miniaturist, a portraitist and an archivist. We love the way he notices just how the paint has dried and for that and for the reason that we hope to read more of him between hard covers we’d like to present him with the Nigel Cox Award.
The Nigel Cox Award recognises excellence in writing and is awarded by Susanna Andrew and Jo McColl from Unity Books Auckland. Past recipients are Geoff Cochrane, Bill Manhire and Anne Kennedy.
Winners receive one Thousand dollars worth of book vouchers from Unity Books.
