Background
Catherine Chidgey was born on April 8, 1970, to Pat and Les Chidgey. Chidgey was raised in Lower Hutt and has lived in Christchurch, Dunedin, and Auckland, New Zealand.
1972
Catherine at 2 in 1972 with her mother Pat, father Les and older sister Helen.
1973
Catherine with her mother Pat.
Photo of Catherine Chidgey
Catherine with her book "The Wish Child"
Catherine at the signing table with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Photo of Catherine Chidgey
1972
Catherine at 2 in 1972 with her mother Pat, father Les and older sister Helen.
1973
Catherine with her mother Pat.
Photo of Catherine Chidgey
Catherine with her book "The Wish Child"
Catherine at the signing table with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Photo of Catherine Chidgey
(When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefu...)
When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard - but Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. Clifford taught Gene about how to find rocks and fossils, and about how to kill birds and fish. Gene passes on a similar inheritance to his daughters, Bridget and Christina - they have their own ways of digging and discovering the past, keeping an account of the life, watching out for the varieties of death that lie hidden. Etta their mother tells a very different story of her 1940s childhood. "In a Fishbone Church" spans continents and decades. From the Berlin rave scene to the Canterbury duck season, from the rural 1950s to the cosmopolitan present, these five vivid lives cohere in a deeply affecting and exhilarating novel.
https://www.amazon.com/Fishbone-Church-Catherine-Chidgey-ebook/dp/B00AAH7X3A/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=In+a+Fishbone+Church&qid=1593178016&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
1999
(A tale of murder mystery and Meccano Golden Deeds tells t...)
A tale of murder mystery and Meccano Golden Deeds tells the story of the middle-aged Patrick Mercer, lying unconscious in a hospital bed: of the teenaged Laura Pearse's disappearance and the grieving of her bereft parents; and the story of Colette, a young woman seeking a new life in a strange city. In warm, compassionate, and beautiful prose, Catherine Chidgey delineates the connections which, however fragile, bind people together across continents and generations.
https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Deeds-Catherine-Chidgey-ebook/dp/B00L0LYEGO/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Golden+Deeds&qid=1593178084&s=digital-text&sr=1-2
2000
(Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1898 is a frontier, where the prog...)
Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1898 is a frontier, where the progress of the modern world has not yet won the battle against the voodoo magic of the swamps, but where miracles of transformation are still possible. Dominating the town is the new Tampa Bay Hotel, with its tangle of Moorish minarets, Byzantine domes, and new electric lighting, designed by Edison himself - a fairytale castle that is a winter magnet for the best sort of people - bankers and industrialists, stockbrokers and shipping merchants, attorneys and architects and celebrities - who come from the northern cities and Europe. But the hotel does have one permanent year-round resident: Monsieur Lucien Goulet III is the exotic wigmaker to the rich and glamorous, and indeed to any resident of Tampa whose desire for the transformations he creates is keen enough to meet his price. Goulet himself is entranced by the head of hair belonging to the young widow Marion Unger. And as the raw material he needs to complete his great masterpiece becomes harder to come by, so he drives his gifted night-scavenger - a teenage Cuban cigar-maker - to increasingly extreme efforts. As this unlikely cast of characters becomes entwined, the secret depths of Goulet’s nature rise to the surface, leading to an electrifying conclusion.
https://www.amazon.com/Transformation-Novel-Catherine-Chidgey/dp/0805069712/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1593178169&sr=1-1
2003
(As Germany's hope for a glorious future begins to collaps...)
As Germany's hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, two children, Sieglinde and Erich, find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city, people are talking of surrender. The days Sieglinde and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives.
https://www.amazon.com/Wish-Child-Novel-Catherine-Chidgey-ebook/dp/B07B4Z9G8V/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1593178332&sr=1-3-catcorr
2016
("The Beat of the Pendulum" is the result of one year in w...)
"The Beat of the Pendulum" is the result of one year in which Chidgey drew upon the language she encountered on a daily basis, such as news stories, radio broadcasts, emails, social media, street signs, TV, and many conversations. As Chidgey filters and shapes the linguistic chaos of her recordings, different characters emerge - her family, including her young daughter, and her husband, mother and sister, her friends, and an extended family formed through surrogacy and donation. In her chronicling of moments of loveliness, strangeness, comedy, and poetry, and sorrow, Chidgey plays with the nature of time and its passing. The Beat of the Pendulum is also an exploration of human memory - how we acquire it, and how we lose it. This bravely experimental and immersive work draws us into the detail, reverberation, and transience of a year in a life.
https://www.amazon.com/Beat-Pendulum-Found-Novel/dp/1785630903/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=The+Beat+of+the+Pendulum&qid=1593178983&sr=8-2
2017
Catherine Chidgey was born on April 8, 1970, to Pat and Les Chidgey. Chidgey was raised in Lower Hutt and has lived in Christchurch, Dunedin, and Auckland, New Zealand.
Catherine was educated at St. Michael's Primary School in Taita, and Sacred Heart College, Lower Hutt. At secondary school, Chidgey studied both German and French. When she was in the sixth form, her German teacher arranged for her stay in Lüneburg in Lower Saxony for three months, with three different host families.
She got a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in German Language and Literature from Victoria University of Wellington.
When she was 16, she went to Germany for three months on an exchange to study at the Freie Universität Berlin.
In 1997 Catherine returned to Victoria University to complete a master's degree in Creative Writing.
"In a Fishbone Church," Catherine's debut novel, was published in 1998, received Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (South-East Asia and South Pacific region), the United Kingdom Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize.
Time Out magazine (London) chose her second novel, "Golden Deeds," which was published in 2000, as a book of the year. "Golden Deeds" was also a 2002 Best Book in the LA Times Book Review, a 2002 Notable Book in the New York Times Book Review, runner-up for the Deutz Medal, and serialized by Radio New Zealand. The NZ Herald described Catherine's third novel which was published in 2003, "The Transformation," as the 'best so far.' United States bookstore chain Barnes & Noble chose it as a Discover Pick of 2005. Her short fiction is also widely published in anthologies and journals.
"The Wish Child" was published to acclaim in 2016. The story of a young boy and girl in Nazi Germany during World War II, it is told by a mysterious narrator whose identity is only revealed in the final pages. The novel won the Acorn Fiction Prize of the Ockham Book Awards, New Zealand's richest literary prize. "The Beat of the Pendulum" has followed a bare year later.
With degrees in German literature, psychology, and creative writing, Catherine now teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato in Hamilton.
She has translated children's picture books from the German for Gecko Press. Catherine's first children’s book, Jiffy, Cat Detective, was published by One Tree House in November 2019.
In 2019, with sponsorship from the University of Waikato, Catherine conceived the Sargeson Prize short story competition - New Zealand's richest short story prize.
In 2020 Catherine published "The Man I Should Have Married: A short story."
Catherine Chidgey is widely known as a fiction writer of short stories. In 1997 Catherine was awarded the Adam Foundation Prize for her portfolio produced during study at Victoria University of Wellington's Creative Writing Programme. Catherine Chidgey has received several awards for her first novel, "In a Fishbone Church," including the Prize in Modern Letters established by businessman and arts philanthropist Glenn Schaeffer, at $60,000 the largest literary prize in New Zealand and Australia.
Catherine's numerous accolades include the prestigious BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award (2013) and the Listener Women's Book Festival Short Story Award (1997). She received the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters and in 2003 was named the best New Zealand novelist under forty by an NZ Listener industry panel. Catherine has held the Sargeson Fellowship, the Todd New Writers' Bursary, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship (France), the Rathcoole Residency (Ireland), the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship and the University of Otago Wallace Residency.
(A tale of murder mystery and Meccano Golden Deeds tells t...)
2000("The Beat of the Pendulum" is the result of one year in w...)
2017(Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1898 is a frontier, where the prog...)
2003(When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefu...)
1999(As Germany's hope for a glorious future begins to collaps...)
2016Quotations: "Writing was something that I always did. I was quite sickly as a child. I was home from school a lot and left to my own devices. I mean, Mum was there around the house, but I had to entertain myself, and there were only two TV channels then, so I watched a lot of Bewitched and I Love Lucy, and I also did a lot of writing. So that is where it started."
Chidgey is married to Alan Bekhuis. Their daughter, Alice, was fathered by Alan, though she was carried by a surrogate mother.
