Another award for top writer

18 September, 2013

Another award for top writer

Aspiring writers have the chance to learn from the very best when novelist Catherine Chidgey takes a six week creative writing course at the University of Waikato in November.

Chidgey added another award to her growing collection on Tuesday when she won New Zealand’s most prestigious short story writing prize, the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award, at the BNZ Literary Awards for her short story, Reverse Living.

She says when she got the call from BNZ to say she’d won “I thought they were querying something on my Visa card.”

Judge Albert Wendt says Chidgey’s entry was “a very powerful and relevant contemporary story”.

“The story is innovatively structured. Much of the story is understated and there is a beautiful/poetic balance between what is left in and what is omitted.”

Chidgey is currently working on her fourth novel alongside teaching creative writing at the University of Waikato.

She says short story writing has always been strong in New Zealand and the number of entries in the awards backed that up.

“It was awesome seeing the really big numbers entered in all categories, that’s very encouraging, especially in the young writers category,” she says.

This year the Katherine Mansfield Award had 750 entries, up from 550 last year.

Chidgey’s writing has always been highly regarded. She has previously held the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship to Menton, France; the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship; the Rathcoola Residency to Cork, Ireland; the Todd New Writers’ Bursary; and the Beatson Residency.

She has been Writer in Residence at the universities of Canterbury, Otago and Waikato, and at the Wallace Arts Centre in Auckland. In 2002, she won the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters, New Zealand’s richest single literary prize.

Her three novels – In a Fishbone Church, Golden Deeds, The Transformation - have all received international acclaim and awards.

Chidgey says her November course, Inspiring Work, is workshop based and looks at “the concept of inspiration as it applies to creative writing”. Prospective students still have several weeks to sign up.

ENDS

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