ALL HER LIVES
Ingrid Horrocks
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.’
Ingrid Horrocks
Ingrid Horrocks’s short story collection, All Her Lives (2025), won of the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her other books include the memoir Where We Swim (2021), a history of women wanderers, and two collections of poetry. Her writing has appeared in Lithub, The Ninth Letter, The Sydney Review of Books, The Spinoff, Landfall, and the Guardian. In 2024, she was the Kaituhi Tarāwhare CNZ Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters and in 2025 she was awarded the Michael King Writers Centre Australian Residency at Varuna. She currently teaches at the IIML and for the Faber Writing Academy.
Claire Williamson
Claire Williamson is a writer, editor and host of the podcast A Little Bit Booked on Fresh FM, an accessible and conversational show discussing all things books and publishing with authors and other keen readers. Originally from Chicago, Claire was previously the Food and Lifestyle Commissioning Editor at The Japan Times in Tokyo and Deputy Editor at Shepherdess magazine. Find her book reviews and fiction in Kete, NZ Listener, Neat Places, Sankaku magazine and more. When she’s not reading, you’ll find Claire at the bouldering gym or the tennis court, or brewing a pour-over coffee. @accidentaltokyoite
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