Background

Charlotte Randall was born in New Zealand.

Education

Charlotte Randall attended the University of Canterbury.

Career

Charlotte Randall is a writer. In addition to writing books, she also writes short stories. She has been published in the literary journal Landfall and, out of four entries, has twice made the shortlist of stories receiving special comments from the judges in the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award. To date, Randall teaches at New Zealand's Writers College.

Charlotte Randall's book, Dead Sea Fruit, is a novel about two families in Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. It deals with the familiar theme of growing up in a suffocating and conformist era but does so with exceptional depth and skill. The novel has enormous emotional energy and transcends the confines of its heritage in New Zealand writing.

Randall followed this successful debut with The Curative, a novel set in Bedlam, London's notorious hospital for the insane, in the Napoleonic era. William Lonsdale, a middle-aged and once-successful theater critic, has been incarcerated in the insane asylum, a victim, he insists, of an unfair plot against him. Chained to the wall, he tells his story to his cellmate and to a woman inmate with whom he rehearses a therapeutic play. The Curative was nominated for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Award.

In Within the Kiss, Randall reimagines the Faust myth. Her Faust character is a New Zealand tennis-mom who aspires to literary fame but who has questionable talent. She agrees to sell her daughter's soul to the girl's seedy tennis coach, who promises to make the girl into a tennis star and the mother into a best-selling author. The process of writing itself, which Randall treats with humor, becomes a central theme. The author wanted it to be humorous and whimsical, but always with this grain of truth about the real horrors of writing and competitive sport. Randall also pointed out that Faust is not really a severe writer but a desperate scribbler. The person to whom writing itself means very little, and publishing success means a lot. And they are always looking for the story, the one that's going to be the bestseller, and makes them whatever they think a writer is rich, famous, and unemployed.

Achievements

• Charlotte Randall is well known as a writer. She is a holder of several honors and awards, including the Reed Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the South East Asia/Pacific section in 1996 for her book, Dead Sea Fruit. Her second novel, The Curative, was joint-runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Charlotte has twice been Finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, in 2005 for What Happen Then, Mr. Bones?, and in 2009 for The Crocus Hour. Her other book, The Bright Side of My Condition, was a Finalist for the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Moreover, Charlotte Randall became a Victoria University of Wellington writing fellow in 2000 and an Ursula Bethell Creative Writing Resident at Canterbury University in 2005.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Bright Side Of My Condition

    (Based on the true story of four convicts who spent more t...)

    2013
  • Crocus Hour

    (From the author of the award-winning The Curative, The Cr...)

    2008
  • The Curative

    (This is the story of an inmate in Bedlam, the London ment...)

    2000
  • Hokitika Town

    (When you're a coin boy you see a lot of life and from low...)

    2011
  • Dead Sea Fruit 1995
  • Within the Kiss 2002
  • What Happen Then, Mr. Bones? 2004

Views

Quotations: "I'm going to write what I'm interested in, and if no one else likes it, well, I guess that means it's too bad."

"I always have goals, but they tend to be vague and inexpressible. In the end, I want the book to be the clarification of the goal."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "She is a novelist who takes risks, who lets her imagination audaciously soar and, like Lloyd Jones and Elizabeth Knox, surprises you with each new book." - Paula Green

Connections

Charlotte Randall is married and has two children.