Our Stories: Catherine Chidgey
“I’m a magpie when it comes to my writing,” laughs Catherine Chidgey. The well-established Kiwi writer has just returned to New Zealand after an international tour promoting her novel, “The Axeman’s Carnival”. The book, which won the prestigious Acorn Prize for best New Zealand adult fiction in 2023, also has a magpie as a storyteller. It is narrated by Tama, a half-domesticated magpie living with some complicated humans on a backcountry Kiwi farm. While in the UK to publicise the novel earlier this summer, Catherine also went searching for new creative tidbits for her upcoming books.
Catherine’s next novel “The Book of Guilt” is set in a British boys’ home in the New Forest in the late 1970s. This unusual thriller about a community’s nervous response to the government’s plans to rehome orphaned children will be published in the UK next spring. Catherine is also working on another book, “The Starving Bride”, which takes place in the sideshows of Blackpool Tower. The setting of her “next-next-next novel” is a villa undergoing restoration in Marseille, France. For her meandering research tour through the UK and Europe for these projects, Catherine took a sabbatical from lecturing in creative writing at the University of Waikato. “I’m the kind of writer who really needs to gather information from the physical place, and the smell of it, and the way the light falls and the sounds of the floorboards creaking,” she explains. While New Zealand is firmly her home, Catherine’s travels allow her to go searching for “these elements which somehow sing to me and say ‘I belong in your work’ - maybe 10 years later, maybe 15 years or 20 years later...So I tuck them away.”
Spreading her magpie wings to forage for inspiration is not always easy. Like all New Zealand writers, Catherine feels the “tyranny of distance” that makes it harder to build a profile on the international literary stage. “It’s one thing to get the invitation to overseas festivals, but it’s another thing to drum up the funding from Creative New Zealand, or the British Council or whoever to fund the travel.” And even once she’s in the Northern Hemisphere, the itinerary doesn’t always go to plan. For the vaudeville scenes in “The Starving Bride”, Catherine connected with the family of an original showman in Blackpool, but she was also repeatedly frustrated by high winds and later an inconvenient private function from going up Blackpool Tower itself. On the French Mediterranean, Catherine was again prevented by weeks of high harbour winds and the closure of various buildings to access some of the settings she had planned to visit. “I was desperately trying not to feel like my research was cursed, I was feeling very artistically frustrated,” she recalls, “so I decided to turn it into art. And so the wind itself is going to be this kind of spectral presence in the margins, making things difficult for the characters!”
Catherine’s creative vision has enlivened the Kiwi literary scene for decades now. She studied literature and psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, and completed her MA in creative writing under Bill Manhire. She has been a Katherine Mansfield Fellow and founded the influential Sargeson Prize for short stories. “In New Zealand, I do lots of literary festivals, bookstore events, speaking to different groups - it’s easy to be in the circuit,” says Catherine. Internationally, she is published by different publishers in each global region. Although she herself doesn’t produce e-Books or print-on-demand, Catherine does recognise a growing expectation that authors will curate their online presence: “that you will be frantically tweeting and Instagramming and being on TikTok.” Literary influencers now play an important role in creating positive spin for traditionally published works. When in the UK, Catherine prioritises bookstore events, live readings and the Cheltenham Literature Festival. “I think people really have the appetite back for literary events that are happening in person,” Catherine says, rather than “you just Zooming in from the other side of the planet.”
Both “The Axeman’s Carnival” and her most recent novel “Pet” are set firmly in New Zealand. Catherine admits this was partly determined by the pandemic, which kept her creativity closer to home. These recent works are darkly humorous, with lighthearted references to Kiwis being “slightly behind the rest of the globe - we’re still watching old episodes of The Love Boat.” Within these seemingly innocuous New Zealand settings, Catherine explores disturbing and oppressive relationship dynamics: “I’m writing about jealousy and betrayal and grief, and a desire to be loved... about relationships that go bad, and the way that we’ll stay in a relationship long after its use-by date.” Catherine is fascinated by the idea of a “witness-narrator” presenting a known place through different eyes - even those of a magpie. Several of Catherine’s earlier books are set hauntingly in Nazi Germany. “The Wish Child”, which explores family secrets during the capitulation of Berlin, won Catherine the Acorn Prize at the NZ Book Awards in 2017. Her subtle Holocaust novel, “Remote Sympathy”, was celebrated by The Guardian as one of the best books of 2022. Catherine says of her work, “I feel really strongly that I’m writing about universal themes of relationship and power dynamics that I think will appeal to readers wherever they happen to be living.”
You can buy "The Axeman's Carnival", "Pet", "Remote Sympathy" and "The Wish Child", as well as Catherine's earlier works, at bookstores throughout the UK. “The Book of Guilt” can also be ordered online pre-publication.
Photo credit: Ebony Lamb