Full list of 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Award winners

Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry winner and Fiction category winner: Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury).

Fiction runners-up: The 10PM Question by Kate De Goldi (Longacre Press) and Acid Song by Bernard Beckett (Longacre Press).

Poetry category winner: The Rocky Shore by Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press).

Montana Medal for Non-Fiction winner and Biography category winner: Rita Angus: An Artist's Life by Jill Trevelyan (Te Papa Press).

Environment category winner: A Continent on the Move: New Zealand Geoscience into the 21st Century edited by Ian J Graham (Geological Society of New Zealand).

History category winner: Buying the Land, Selling the Land by Richard Boast (Victoria University Press).

Reference and Anthology category winner: Collected Poems 1951-2006 by CK Stead (Auckland University Press).

Lifestyle & Contemporary Culture category winner: Ladies, A Plate: Traditional Home Baking by Alexa Johnston (Penguin Group New Zealand).

Illustrative category winner: Len Castle: Making the Molecules Dance by Len Castle (Lopdell House Gallery).

Maori Language Award: He Pataka Kupu te kai a te rangatira, the first-ever dictionary written entirely in te reo Maori. Compiled by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo (the Maori Language Commission) and published by Penguin Group New Zealand.

Each category winner was presented with a prize of $5,000. The winners of the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry and the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction were each presented with an additional prize of $10,000. The runners-up in the Fiction category received $2,500. The Readers' Choice Award carries a monetary prize of $1,000.

BREAKING NEWS: Novel About My Wife wins Montana New Zealand Fiction Book of the Year 2009

Congratulations to Emily Perkins - just annoucned winner of New Zealand's post prestigious literary award, the 2009 Montana Fiction book of the year!!

Perkins took out the award with her book, A Novel About My Wife which centres around Tom Stone. Madly in love with his wife Ann and pushing forty the couple are expecting their first child, and buy a semi-derelict house in Hackney. Despite their spiralling money troubles, they believe this is their settled future. But Ann becomes convinced she’s being shadowed by a homeless man whose presence seems like a terrible omen. As their child grows, Ann’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, feverish and disturbed. On the verge of losing everything, Tom makes a decision that he hopes will save their lives.

Novel About My Wife is described as a taut, sensuous and chilling portrait of a marriage beset by paranoia and obsession.

Want to know a little more about the author? Emily Perkins was born in Christchurch in 1970. She is the author of Not Her Real Name, a collection of short stories which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the novels Leave Before You Go and The New Girl.

Emily Perkins was the 2006 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow. She used the fellowship to work on Novel About My Wife (Bloomsbury, 2008). She lives in Auckland.

Congratulations to Emily!!!

And commiserations to Kate de Goldi - her young adults novel "The 10pm Question" was a fabulous contender and it must have been a very tight race!