Tell You What ― Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2016

Our editors went out into New Zealand and rounded up a pile of blogs and travelogues, memoirs and journalism – some of the best true stories from the last year or so. We’ve got bullies and Barbie, chakra and shipwrecks, loose lips and AK47s. From Oamaru to Xinjiang to New York, Tell You What: 2016 introduces us to some extraordinary tales of coming out and going home, of living and dying, of tragedy and transformation.

Susanna Andrew was born in 1966 and grew up in Glen Innes, Auckland. The youngest of eight siblings, she learnt at an early age the value and currency of a good story well told. She might have been educated at Selwyn College and Auckland University, although her attendance was only ever hearsay, but books provided her real schooling. Susanna has spent most of her working life in and around the book trade: in publishing, in bookshops, and in libraries. She has travelled extensively as a bookseller in the United Kingdom and Europe, and spent five years living in Berlin with her late husband Nigel Cox. As communications manager for the New Zealand Book Council, she founded the ‘True Stories Told Live’ initiative. She currently edits the book pages forMetro Magazine while raising three children. She likes to swim in the harbor whenever she can.Jolisa Gracewood was born in 1968 and grew up in Naenae and Papatoetoe, which made it almost inevitable she would live in that other twice-told town, New York, New York. The eldest of four siblings, she was a model student, apart from that one detention for failing to return a library book. After studying Japanese and French at the University of Canterbury, she spent two years at the University of Tokyo as a research student. This was followed nearly two decades tripping around university towns on the east coast of the United States with her astrophysicist partner. She has a PhD from in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. While in the US, Jolisa taught students at Cornell and Yale how to write essays and nonfiction prose; co-edited two anthologies of Japanese short stories for advanced learners; and wrote about books for her local newspaper and for New Zealand magazines. In her blog, Busytown (part of the Public Address community of blogs), she wrote about raising her two sons in New York City and New Haven, CT. Since moving back to New Zealand with her family in 2012, Jolisa has worked as a literary editor, book reviewer, literary festival panellist, and freelance urban activist, and still subscribes to the New Yorker magazine.