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Profile
Charlotte Grimshaw is a novelist, short story writer and fiction reviewer. She was named the Book Publishers Association of New Zealand Reviewer of the Year in 2008.
Selected published works
Provocation, 1999; Guilt, 2000; Foreign City, 2005; Opportunity, 2007.
Biography
Charlotte Grimshaw was born in 1966, and grew up in Auckland. She has a degree in Law and Arts from Auckland University. She currently lives in Auckland with her family and writes full time.
Her first two novels were published in New Zealand and Britain. Provocation (1999) draws on her experience as a criminal lawyer. English crime novelist Sarah Dunant describes it as "atmospheric, intelligent, and seductively strange…leads you into a slow-burning nightmare". In 2000, Grimshaw was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for literature and wrote Guilt. This novel follows the lives of four characters in 1987 Auckland. As the title suggests, it explores the phenomenon of guilt, and the damage that people can inadvertently inflict on one another. Foreign City (2005) is essentially three novels in one. It is firstly the story of a young New Zealand painter living in London. She has two chance encounters that set her on a search for answers. Can she really ‘see’ her new city properly? Can she reconcile family life and art?
Grimshaw was awarded the 2006 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award for a short story with the title Plane Sailing. The judges described Grimshaw’s story as "clever, serious, amusing, superbly crafted and wonderfully sly". Other stories have been published in the Listener, the Sunday Star Times and in anthologies.
A collection of short stories, Opportunity, was published in 2007. It is a series that can be read separately, but contributes to a unified whole because in each story a character from a previous story appears. (The 19 stories have 17 first person narrators). Opportunity was awarded the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry at the Montana Book Awards in 2008. The judges reported "Opportunity was a clear winner for the breadth and ambition of its design, the layers of meaning, and the multiplicity of reading experiences it affords". This title was also short-listed in 2007 for the world's richest short fiction prize, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Singularity, a companion volume to Opportunity, will be published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom in June 2009.
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