The New Zealand Book Awards celebrate excellence, identifying the very best books for adult readers written by New Zealanders. From 2016, in a partnership between the New Zealand Book Awards Trust and the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival Trust, they will be held annually as part of the Auckland Writers Festival. This enables a valuable synergy between an event that attracted over 60,000 attendances in 2015 and New Zealand writers.

Books submitted in the four main categories, written by first-time authors, are also eligible to win the Best First Book awards for Fiction, Poetry and Non-Fiction.

Books written entirely in te reo are eligible for the Maori Language award.

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