[5] The first award, judged by Joan Stevens, was shared by Maurice Duggan (short story) and Elsie Locke (essay).
Special awards of 15 guineas each were also presented to the runners-up, O. E. Middleton for a short story and Arapera Blank for an article respectively.
[8] At the awards ceremony in 1963, New Zealand's Governor-General Bernard Fergusson caused some controversy by commenting that it was "shocking" that "123 years after the Treaty of Waitangi there is not one Maori in the room".
His comments were sparked by an earlier speech by the competition's judge which had noted the number of stories concerning conflict between Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand Europeans).
[8] In 1993 a non-fiction essay award was introduced to mark the centenary of women's suffrage in New Zealand.
": Winners of the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, 1959–1999, and edited by Jane Tolerton and Joy Tonks.