www.nzbookawards.nz 2026 Winner
Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, judges citation;
"Poet, memoirist and scholar Ingrid Horrocks turns to fiction and crushes it.
Across nine elegant, probing stories that range from the late eighteenth
century to the unsettled present, from rural Wairarapa to icy Norwegian
ports and rave culture Berlin, All Her Lives explores the shifting expectations
and constraints of womanhood. Characters confront leaky rentals and sexual
assault, join anti-nuclear and climate movements, while seeking many forms
of love. Sparks from one story and one generation ignite elsewhere in the
book, illustrating how material conditions, freedoms and ideologies can be
shaped, for better or worse, by our forebears. Emotionally intelligent and
historically alert, this book is an outrageously good addition to the top shelf
of New Zealand fiction."
All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance.
From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son's climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures - and for finding hope.
Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women - all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward - and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms. It is Ingrid Horrocks's first work of fiction.
'A wonderful collection that swims in and out of women's lives across time, exploring the struggle for freedom and love. I'll be thinking about it for a long time - a book of quiet force.'
-Emily Perkins, author of Lioness
Contents: Evie on Branch 11
Marvellous Instruments 34
The Usual Spiel 79
Concrete Box 98
The Silver Ship 116
The End of the Fair 151
Women's Choice Night 185
Murmuration 209
The Silver Ship II 252
Notes 265
Acknowledgements 271
Ingrid Horrocks's books include the memoir Where We Swim (2021), a literary history, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility (2017), and two collections of poetry. Her writing has appeared in Lithub, The Ninth Letter, The Sydney Review of Books, The Spinoff, Landfall, and the Guardian. In 2024 she was the Kaituhi Tarawhare CNZ Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters and in 2025 she was awarded the Michael King Writers Centre Australian Residency at Varuna. Ingrid lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, with her partner and twin daughters.
Paperback, 272 pages
H: 210mm W: 138mm