Join us to celebrate the nine interlinking tales that comprise All Her Lives, this year’s Jann Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize winner at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Learn why Ingrid Horrocks, the author of several creative non-fiction books, turned to fiction – and the short story form, in particular – and why she believes reading about and imagining possibilities for hope is more radical than invoking dystopia. Chaired by Claire Williamson.

All Her Lives: Nine Stories follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance.

From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son’s climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures – and for finding hope.

In her review of All Her Lives on Kete, Claire Williamson (host of the radio show and podcast, A Little Bit Booked) writes: ‘The stories in All Her Lives give women the space to be messy, ambitious, hopeful, afraid – to want for the things already in their grasp, and for things beyond what society expects of them.’