Montana Wines ends 15-year stint as book award sponsors

International drinks giant Pernod Ricard has canned its long-running sponsorship of the annual book publishing awards.

Wine company Montana took over naming rights to the book awards in 1994. They were originally established in 1968 as the Wattie Book Awards and later became the Goodman Fielder Wattie Awards.

In 1996, the Montana Book Awards merged with the New Zealand Book Awards, which were established in 1976, to become the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

From next year, the awards will be sponsored by New Zealand Post, which already sponsors the children and young adult’s book awards, the Mansfield Prize, the National Schools Poetry Awards and Literacy Aotearoa.

Finalists for the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards are due to be announced on June 2 and the winners revealed at a gala function in the Auckland War Memorial Museum on July 27.

Booksellers NZ chief executive Lincoln Gould, who administers the awards, says the change of sponsor will coincide with major changes to the awards in time for next year.

The awards are commercially important because they guarantee bestseller status to winning titles, which have included Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, Professor Anne Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog and The Wine Atlas of New Zealand, by Michael Cooper.

While no one is saying why Pernod Ricard has given up the awards, they have been around for so long that they are in danger of being taken for granted.

When Montana dropped its sponsorship of the Sunday night theatre spot on TV One, many still thought it was the sponsor for years later.

The Montana awards have always attracted criticism from within the book community – mainly from those who don't win them.

The fiction section last year created shockwaves when the judges selected only four works instead of the usual five. This was seen as a snub to such established writers as Owen Marshall, Damien Wilkins and Elizabeth Knox, all of whom had new titles in 2008.

The judges justified their decision by saying the four finalists were well above the remaining 35 entries.

Posthumous works by Janet Frame and Nigel Cox were excluded because the awards are now limited to living writers.