Emily Perkins has won the 2009 Montana Medal for fiction or poetry for her book, Novel About My Wife.
Convenor of the awards judges, Mark Williams, says Perkins' work is "highly assured fiction by a writer working at the height of her powers".
Novel About My Wife is described as "sophisticated and urban", registering the nuances of class, concealment and reserve in domestic English life.
Meanwhile, Wellington curator and writer Jill Trevelyan has won the non-fiction award for a biography about one of New Zealand's most celebrated artists, Rita Angus.
Philip Norman, the awards' biography category advisor, says Trevelyan's book helps establish Angus' "rightful place as a principal figure in the history and development of New Zealand art".
The awards were presented at a gala dinner ceremony at Auckland War Memorial Museum on Monday night. Winners of the country's most prestigious awards for contemporary writing were chosen from more than 220 books submitted.
The 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards winners are as follows:
Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry winner and Fiction category winner: Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury).
Fiction runners-up: The 10PM Question by Kate De Goldi (Longacre Press) and Acid Song by Bernard Beckett (Longacre Press).
Poetry category winner: The Rocky Shore by Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press).
Montana Medal for Non-Fiction winner and Biography category winner: Rita Angus: An Artist's Life by Jill Trevelyan (Te Papa Press).
Environment category winner: A Continent on the Move: New Zealand Geoscience into the 21st Century edited by Ian J Graham (Geological Society of New Zealand).
History category winner: Buying the Land, Selling the Land by Richard Boast (Victoria University Press).
Reference and Anthology category winner: Collected Poems 1951-2006 by CK Stead (Auckland University Press).
Lifestyle & Contemporary Culture category winner: Ladies, A Plate: Traditional Home Baking by Alexa Johnston (Penguin Group New Zealand).
Illustrative category winner: Len Castle: Making the Molecules Dance by Len Castle (Lopdell House Gallery).
Maori Language Award: He Pataka Kupu te kai a te rangatira, the first-ever dictionary written entirely in te reo Maori, has won this year's Te Reo Maori Literary prize. Compiled by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo (the Maori Language Commission) and published by Penguin Group New Zealand, the dictionary that translates to 'A Storehouse of Words - the food of chiefs' contains some 24,000 head-words from the old world through to the idioms of modern Maori.
Each category winner was presented with a prize of $5,000. The winners of the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry and the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction were each presented with an additional prize of $10,000. The runners-up in the Fiction category received $2,500. The Readers' Choice Award carries a monetary prize of $1,000.
