Catherine Chidgey

Profile
Catherine Chidgey was judged the best New Zealand novelist under 40 in a critics’ poll. Her first two novels are warm, compassionate and beautifully written depictions of contemporary life. Her third, about a dubious Parisian wigmaker in early 20th-century Florida, is distinguished by its rich detail and dark wit.

Selected published works
In a Fishbone Church, 1998; Golden Deeds, 2000; The Transformation, 2003.

Biography
Catherine Chidgey was born in 1970 and grew up in the Hutt Valley, Wellington. She has degrees in creative writing, psychology and German literature, and lived for two years in Berlin, where she held a DAAD scholarship for post-graduate study.

In 1997, Chidgey was awarded the Adam Foundation Prize for the portfolio she produced while studying with Bill Manhire at Victoria University of Wellington’s creative writing programme. Her first novel, In a Fishbone Church, won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book of Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 1998, the South East Asia and South Pacific Region Prize in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel in 1999, a Betty Trask prize for a first book (United Kingdom) and was included in the Orange Prize for fiction (United Kingdom) longlist.

In a Fishbone Church sold over 10,000 copies in New Zealand, was published in the United Kingdom and Australia by Picador, and in Germany by Carl Hanser Verlag. It attracted the notice of overseas critics and authors: Louis de Bernieres described it as “warm, subtle and evocative. You will be thinking about it long after you have finished reading.”

Catherine Chidgey’s fiction is marked by her confident voice, and her ability to manage both humour and pathos with equal adroitness.

Chidgey’s second novel, Golden Deeds, also a New Zealand bestseller, was runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. It has been published by Picador in the United Kingdom and under the title, The Strength of the Sun, by Henry Holt in the United States, where it was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”.

The Transformation, Chidgey’s third novel, was published in New Zealand in 2003 and was published by Picador and Holt in 2005.

Chidgey’s other honours include the inaugural $60,000 Glenn Schaeffer Prize in Modern Letters (2002), the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France (2001), the Todd New Writer’s Bursary (1999), the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury (2003), the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and the 2005 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. In 2003 she was judged the best New Zealand novelist under 40 in the New Zealand Listener critics’ poll.