Martin Edmond clears his debts

"Friday morning I fly to Wellington for five days. To attend the Montana New Zealand Book Awards next Monday night. Chronicle of the Unsung is a finalist in the Biography section (even though it is not a biography) which, I am told, includes Memoir (it is not a memoir either). Selection as a finalist obliges a publisher to transport their author to the ceremony, hence my trip. If I win my category I get a cash prize of $5000.00, almost the exact amount I have gone into (private) debt over the course of this year so far……"

Martin Edmond in a post last week to Luca Antara

AND THE WINNERS ARE ...

Biography
Chronicle of the Unsung by Martin Edmond (Auckland University Press).
(from the N.Z. Herald, 26 July, 2005)

What happened was, my mind drifted. One part of me would be constructing grammatically correct, if anatomically impossible and psychologically implausible, interactions, while the rest would wander in the landscapes of my youth. Lucid, brilliant images of beautiful uninhabited places I had once known and long forgotten floated in front of my eyes, so that I viewed the words processing behind the smeared plastic screen through a mist of paradisiacal scapes. The melancholy of those scenes, evoked in that seamy. steamy interior crowded with phantoms of lust, cruelty, rage and disappointment, is my strongest memory of that time.

Martin Edmond: from Chronicle of the Unsung

Congratulations, Martin. It's a beautiful book, which I treasure, though your hand-written note inside my copy is a bit fulsome.