Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Asia-Pacific region). It won a Betty Trask Award in the UK and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was chosen by Time Out magazine, London, as a book of the year, and was a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times Book Review and a Best Book in the LA Times Book Review. In 2002 she won the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters, New Zealand’s richest single literary prize, and in 2003 she was named by a Listener panel of writers, critics and booksellers as the best New Zealand novelist under 40. In 2013 she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award – New Zealand’s most prestigious short story prize – and in 2017 her best-selling fourth novel the The Wish Child won the $50,000 fiction prize at the New Zealand book awards. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and widely anthologised, and she has been highly commended in the Bridport Prize, the Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and the Moth Short Story Prize. Her ‘found’ novel, The Beat of the Pendulum, was longlisted for the 2018 New Zealand book awards, and her most recent honour is the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. Her sixth novel, Remote Sympathy, is due for international release.

Catherine has held fellowships in New Zealand and internationally, including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship to Menton, France. She has been Writer in Residence at the universities of Canterbury, Otago and Waikato. She teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato in Hamilton. In 2019, with funding from Waikato, she initiated and judged the inaugural Sargeson Prize – New Zealand’s richest short story competition.