Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey is a multiple award-winner whose novels have achieved international acclaim. Her eighth, Pet, shot to number one on the NZ bestseller list immediately on release, pushing The Axeman's Carnival to number two. The Axeman's Carnival won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards - the country's biggest writing prize. Remote Sympathy was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction – the UK's most prestigious annual book award celebrating and honouring fiction written by women. It was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award – the world’s largest prize for a single novel published in English, worth €100,000.

In a Fishbone Church, her debut, won Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South-East Asia and South Pacific). It also won the Betty Trask Award (UK) and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Golden Deeds, was a book of the year in Time Out magazine (London), the LA Times Book Review and the New York Times Book Review.

Her fourth novel, The Wish Child, was an instant bestseller, winning the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, the Nielsen Independent New Zealand Bestseller award, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize. The Times (UK) called it ‘A remarkable book with a stunningly original twist.’

Diverse in subject and setting, Catherine’s work is ‘writing of extraordinary precision’ (Landfall), crafted by ‘an artist who may claim a perfect ear, an exquisite tone’ (Evening Post), and who ‘finds metaphor, contiguity and paradox wherever she looks’ (New Zealand Herald). ‘Intelligent, lyrical, disciplined and observant, she is the real deal, the star of her generation’ (Listener). Her accolades include the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, the Prize in Modern Letters, the Sargeson Fellowship, the Todd New Writers’ Bursary, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship (France), the Rathcoola Residency (Ireland), the NZSA Beatson Fellowship and the University of Otago Wallace Residency. She has been Writer in Residence at the universities of Canterbury, Otago and Waikato.

Catherine holds degrees in German literature, psychology and creative writing, and her short fiction is widely published in anthologies and journals. She has translated many children’s picture books from the German, and her own children’s book, Jiffy, Cat Detective, was published in 2019, with a second, Jiffy's Greatest Hits, appearing in 2022. She lives in Ngāruawāhia and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Waikato, where she initiated the Sargeson Prize - the country's richest short story award.