Why are onions so under-rated?
On Wednesday night, Airini Beautrais suddenly became $57,000 richer when she won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, New Zealand’s premier book award. But you won’t see her quitting her day job any time soon.
‘‘It’s kind of like this dream scenario to just write for a year, but then what will you do the year after that?’’ Beautrais wondered aloud. ‘‘You need money to pay the bills, your kids still need food and clothing, and you’ve used up your funds. It’s a bit of a conundrum.’’
Beautrais was speaking the morning after the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony – still, she admitted, slightly reeling from her big win the night before.
She was so certain she wasn’t going to beat previous winners Catherine Chidgey and Pip Adam, and previous nominee Brannavan Gnanalingam, that she hadn’t taken the following day off work, so she was on the phone from UCOL Whanganui, where she teaches biology to nursing students.
It’s an unlikely vocation for a poet and writer of fiction (Beautrais has published four volumes of poetry; her Acorn Prize-winning short story collection, Bug Week, is her first work of prose).
Beautrais has a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University, and has taught the subject in the past, but found it hard.
‘‘To get good at [writing] you need to really immerse yourself in it and play around and experiment. As a teacher you’re helping guide that process but you can’t really say, ‘This is how to write a successful story, here are the ingredients’... Whereas science teaching is very factual. The left ventricle is always going to be the left ventricle, so I don’t feel like a fraud saying to people, ‘This is the anatomy of the heart’. I know I’m not wrong about that.’’
Having a job outside the literary world ‘‘helps my sanity’’, Beautrais added. ‘‘We can become really insular in our thinking... I’m a multitasker, I like to have different things going on.’’
That’s good, because Beautrais has plenty going on. As well as her teaching work, which she described as ‘‘pretty much full time’’, and writing awardwinning books, she is a single mother to two children, aged 11 and 9.
Beautrais says she has a tendency to abandon projects. Her challenge is finding the time to finish a book and go through the process of editing; in the case of Bug Week, that was made possible by a Creative New Zealand grant that allowed her to cut down her teaching hours for a while in 2017.
‘‘I feel like, especially as mothers, there’s a lot of pressure on us to be superhuman,’’ she said.
Social issues inevitably turn up in her work, says Beautrais, who grew up in ‘‘a very far-Left kind of a family’’.
‘‘A big part of the work of fiction is to examine how people work, and how relationships between people work. Fiction’s about when things go a little bit wrong.’’
Things go a little bit wrong in life too, of course, and the juggle is real: Right now, Beautrais’ creative ball is ‘‘in the low part of its cycle’’.
But her surprise win at the Ockhams shows sometimes, things go a little bit right, too. Even if she’s still going to work tomorrow.