Literary Birthday – 8 April – Catherine Chidgey
Happy Birthday, Catherine Chidgey, born on 8 April 1970.
Catherine Chidgey Quotes
- [I became a writer] To entertain and to move. To get the story out of my system (and into someone else’s) so it will allow me some peace. To try to capture an eloquence that eludes me when I open my mouth. Because I am endlessly fascinated by this strange, elaborate, imperfect, beautiful machine we call language. (Women’s Prize)
- I did start writing really young because I was sick a lot as a child and home from school a lot and left to my own devices. I watched a lot of things like I Love Lucy and Bewitched, and I played a lot of Scrabble with my mother, and I wrote to entertain myself. Up until I was 12, I was home a lot from school and and writing often bad poetry or pretty bad short stories. That’s where it started. (Newsroom)
- Earlier on I did luxuriate more with language than I do now. It was probably more language driven than plot driven. (Newsroom)
- I still get a huge kick out of putting together a beautiful sentence where every beat feels in the right place when I read it aloud, which I do with all my work. I still love doing that. But over the years I think plot has become more important to me, or something that I pay more attention to anyway. So I’m thinking about putting a story together, not just on an individual sentence level where it sounds beautiful sentence by sentence, but where it also feels satisfying in terms of story. (Newsroom)
- I set myself a word count. Usually it’s around 400 words. That seems about what I can manage. And that’s polished words. And there’s no possibility of not hitting that number each day, so I have to keep going until I do hit that number. (Newsroom)
- The way I work is that I kind of store away snippets that for whatever reason speak to me the moment that I encounter them. And I know that somehow they belong in my work. I’m just not sure how. So I make note of them either in one of my beautiful notebooks or on a scrap of paper or phone or whatever. (Newsroom)
- I have to polish and perfect as I go. I can’t leave it looking ugly. I can’t. (Newsroom)
- I need to be somewhere totally quiet in order to write, so the door needs to be shut. The child needs to be somewhere down the other end of the house. I write best if there’s no one in the house at all. I am a very solitary person. I like my own company and I’m an introvert. (Newsroom)
- I hope they [readers] feel that they’ve been fully immersed in the slightly off-kilter, unsettling world I’ve created. That I’ve told them an engrossing story that has transported them somewhere new and that they feel they’ve come to know my characters on a human level. I also like my readers to keep wondering about the characters after the final page – to put themselves in my characters’ shoes and ask: What would I do in this situation? In which direction would my moral compass swing? (SWF)
Catherine Chidgey is an award-winning New Zealand novelist, short-story writer, and university lecturer. She has published nine novels. Catherine is ‘one of New Zealand’s greatest living writers’ according to Radio New Zealand. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and Pacific Region); the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on two occasions; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. Her debut novel, In a Fishbone Church, was published in 1998. Her ninth novel, the dystopian The Book of Guilt, was published in 2025. It was selected as one of the top books of 2025 by Amazon and People magazine. Follow her on Instagram.
Source for image: Helen Mayall, Copyrighted free use, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chidgey_Nov_2019.jpg
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