Annaleese Jochems

Annaleese Jochems (born 1994) is a New Zealand author and bookseller. Her debut novel Baby won the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing and the Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Life and career Jochems was born in Whangārei in 1994, and grew up on a farm in Pakaraka. Her father is a beef farmer and her mother is a teacher, and she has two younger brothers.

Jochems studied creative writing, first at the Manukau Institute of Technology and subsequently at the International Institute of Modern Letters where she completed a Master of Arts. She was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing in 2016 for her draft manuscript, which was published as Baby by Victoria University Press in 2017.

In 2018 Baby was shortlisted for the top fiction award at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and received the Hubert Church Award for the best first book. It was also longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award for best crime novel.

In June 2018 Jochems and her mother opened a secondhand bookshop called Book Hound in Newtown.