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Profile
Dame Fiona Kidman, OBE, DCNZM, has twice been honoured for her services to literature. In 1988 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire and in 1998 she was made a Dame Commander of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Selected published works
The Book of Secrets, 1994; The Best of Fiona Kidman’s Short Stories, 1998; A Needle in the Heart, 2002; Songs From the Violet Café, 2003; The Captive Wife, 2005; At the End of Darwin Road: A Memoir, 2008.
Biography
Dame Fiona was born in Hawera in 1940. Her first job was as a librarian. She has also worked as a journalist, writer, radio producer, scriptwriter, critic and a teacher of writing.
Kidman has published eight novels. Her early novels were A Breed of Women (1979), Mandarin Summer (1981), and Paddy’s Puzzle (1983). The Book of Secrets (1987) is based on a historical account of a Scottish preacher who led immigrants to Nova Scotia and Waipu in northern New Zealand. It won the 1988 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. Other novels include True Stars (1990), Ricochet Baby (1996), and Songs from the Violet Café (2003).
Kidman's latest novel is The Captive Wife (2005). It is based on a true story about the kidnapping by Taranaki Maori and the subsequent rescue of Betty Guard and her children in 1834. It was Joint Winner, Readers Choice and Joint Runner-up in the Fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2006. It has been translated into French (under the title Rescapée) and has sold exceptionally well.
Kidman has also written short stories, poetry, non-fiction, scripts for radio and television, edited anthologies, and judged national and international competitions including the Commonwealth Fiction Prize (1991), the Tasmania Pacific Regional prize (2001), and Fish Short Story prize, Ireland (2006).
Her early writing frequently explored suburban and provincial life, its morals and hypocrisies. She has a long-held interest in women’s role in society and her focal characters are often non-conformist. In recent years, she has more closely examined the mutual voices of men and women, both in a personal and historical context. Her historical novels are set in wide-ranging locations and explore the impact of early Maori and European contact.
Kidman was the national president of PEN (the New Zealand Society of Authors) from 1981 to 1983. She is President of Honour of the New Zealand Book Council. In 1988 she was the Victoria University writing fellow and in 2001 received the A.W. Reed lifetime achievement award. She was the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow in 2006. In 2007 Kidman toured France as part of Les Belles Etrangéres (The Beautiful Strangers), an annual French government initiative promoting the literature of one country.
Her memoir, At the End of Darwin Road was published in March 2008
Dame Fiona’s website is www.fionakidman.co.nz
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