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DIFFERENT STYLES How to Marry Harry has nothing to do with the married Prince Harry. It’s a light-hearted chick-lit novel (out 1 February), written by sisters Nikki Perry and Kirsty Roby while they were bored during lockdown in 2020. “While pondering characters, I came across Harry Styles, listened to his music and thought ‘he’s a nice young man,’” Nikki tells Capital. Harry isn’t actually a character in the book, which has middle-aged sisters Jo and Bobbi visit the UK, half-jokingly wanting to matchmake Jo’s daughter and Harry. The real-life sisters wrote collaboratively using Google Docs.
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Sarah Forster was surprised and “elated” to get a phone call saying she’d won the Storylines Betty Gilderdale Award for outstanding service to children's and young adults’ literature and reading. “I still feel like a new kid in the industry!” says Sarah, co-founder of The Sapling – a website focusing on children’s and youngadult books. She’s also been an administrator, communications advisor, advocate, and volunteer in the field. Sarah received a $2000 award.
“New Zealanders are turning to books as a source of entertainment and comfort in these pandemic times,” says Nevena Nikolic from Nielsen Book NZ. Its BookScan data shows sales over the year ending mid-November 2021 were up 17% (in dollars spent) from the preceding year. Adult Fiction climbed 21% to $27 million ($5 million more than the preceding year).
Award-winning author and urban historian Ben Schrader (Capital #41) is the 2022 JD Stout Fellow at Victoria University. From March, he’ll work on a book about historic conservation in New Zealand. “As a child in 1970s Wellington, I used to admire the Victorian and Edwardian buildings that lined Lambton Quay,” Ben says. “When almost all of them were demolished in the 1980s, I decided that one day, I’d like to find out why Aotearoa’s cultural heritage is so often destroyed.”
