Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
New Zealand literary award
The Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry is an award at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, presented annually to the winner of the poetry category. The winner receives a NZ$10,000 prize.
History
The New Zealand Book Awards were set up by the New Zealand Literary Fund, a government organisation, in 1976. Annual awards were presented for literary merit in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and (later) book production.
The Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards, New Zealand's other principal literary awards event, did not specifically award poetry prizes until 1994, when sponsorship was taken over by Montana Wines and the event's name was changed to the Montana Book Awards. In 1994 and 1995, the Montana Book Awards included a category for poetry.
In 1996, the two awards events were merged to create the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and offering prizes in six categories, including poetry. In 2010, the New Zealand Post took over as sponsor, having supported the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for the previous 14 years.
In 2015, Auckland property development firm Ockham Residential assumed sponsorship of the awards. No prizes were presented in that year.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry” as new Zealand literary award. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as new Zealand literary award. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17054194. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1994, 1995 and 1996.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.