Ripiro Beach wins supreme 2020 Heritage Literary award for Non-Fiction

Bateman Books is proud to announce that Caroline Barron’s powerful memoir Ripiro Beach: A memoir of life after near death has won the New Zealand Heritage Literary Award for Non-fiction.

Barron also won the Short Prose Award at the NZ Heritage Literary Awards in 2018 for an excerpt from the same book.

Shortlisted alongside such heavy-hitting Aotearoa writers as C.K. Stead and Peter Simpson, Barron is thrilled to receive the award. Says Barron: ‘In a year of cancellations and disappointments, the meaning and impact of this award is immense. It also reaffirms that people, especially women, are hungry to read other women’s stories, to know that they are not alone.’

Extracts from some of the reviews of Ripiro Beach:

‘Caroline Barron is a woman whose prose is up there with this country’s finest female authors, think Frame and Kidman . . . It will be a disservice to this uncompromising writer if her work doesn’t make it on to the 2020 bestsellers’ list.’

― Jill Nicholas, NZME

‘Ripiro Beach is a sincere, well-written and very savvy memoir.’

― Nicholas Reid, Reid’s Reader blog

‘A really compelling read . . . an evocative writer.’

― Holly Walker, Radio New Zealand

‘Barron is adept at vividly conjuring scenes from these lives in her imagination; we keenly feel how the details she discovers press on her, and distress her. These ancestors have taken hold of her and will not let her go.’

― Kate Duignan, Academy of New Zealand Literature

You can read more about the New Zealand Heritage Literary Awards and the full winners list here: https://www.booksellers.co.nz/news/ripiro-beach-wins-supreme-2020-heritage-literary-award

 Ripiro Beach: A memoir of life after near death by Caroline Barron (Bateman Books; $34.99). Available now from all good bookstores.