Former Ockham Book prize winner says writing has become an obsession
Kiwi novelist Catherine Chidgey says she keeps hustling to avoid a scenario like the one she had where she went 13 years without publishing anything.
Critically acclaimed Kiwi novelist Catherine Chidgey, who has published four books within five years, worries all her hard work might vanish if she ponders too long on how sustainable her pace is.
The 55-year-old Ngāruawāhia-based writer, who won the major fiction prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for The Axeman's Carnival in 2023, simply wants to put down as many of her ideas on the page as possible.
“I’m very superstitious that it will all just evaporate, and I’ll go back to having a period of 13 years of no publishing, which is what happened between 2003 and 2016,” she tells Saturday Morning.
Catherine Chidgey with her Ockham New Zealand Book Award-winning novel, The Axeman's Carnival.
Marcel Tromp
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“I think if you don’t have that crazy passion for the topic that you’re writing about – for instance, finding out which episodes of Jim'll Fix It would’ve been playing on these exact dates in 1979 in the UK – then the writing just won’t be as exacting and as richly three-dimensional as it should be or as I want it to be.”
She admits writing has become a bit of an obsession. But it’s a crucial part of her life.
“I really don’t have hobbies as such, and I would never call writing a hobby because it’s a job. But it is basically the thing that I want to do all the time when I’m not doing my day job which is teaching creative writing at the University of Waikato.
“It’s the thing that I can’t wait to get back to, I love going down research rabbit holes … I just love the thrill of the chase, and I love those moments that happen when you’re researching when you stumble across something that suddenly you know is absolutely relevant to the book, [that is] central to the imagery and you never knew it existed before you started this wild chase.”
Catherine Chidgey: The Book of Guilt
Her ninth novel, The Book of Guilt, sparked an international bidding war, which was won by revered British publishing house John Murray (est. 1768), whose publishing canon includes Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Jane Austen's Emma, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and more recently Stephen Hawking's final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions.
Catherine Chidgey's dystopian ninth novel The Book of Guilt sparked an international bidding war between publishers.
Te Herenga Waka University Press
Chidgey feels lucky to have had her novels published globally, but this one – by far – has bumped her career, she says.
“It’s so hard for writers from New Zealand to get attention in the US and the UK and even Australia. So to be able to use ‘bidding war’ as a headline helps get attention, which helps get reviews, helps get interviews and it’s all grist to the mill.”
The Book of Guilt opens with 13-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William, who are the last remaining residents of a New Forest home, as part of the government’s Sycamore Scheme, where they’re essentially held captive. But the boys are desperate to survive from a mysterious illness they only know as ‘the bug’ so they can move on to a seemingly happy place known as the Big House in Margate.
The story is set in a sinister and alternate version of England in 1979, but it does share cultural and historical touchstones from our world (i.e. British TV show Jim'll Fix It hosted by Jimmy Savile) and even has a government in place similar to Margeret Thatcher’s.
Chidgey, whose second book Remote Sympathy was set in Nazi Germany, says she does have a tendency to draw on the darker elements of humans.
“They live in one of the Sycamore homes for children which are scattered throughout the country and once every two months Dr Roach comes to visit them and to examine them and check on how badly affected they are by an illness that the boys ever call ‘the bug’ and it affects different children differently, but they have to take medicine every day to protect them from ‘the bug’.
“The wish of every child in every Sycamore home and the fervent wish of these three brothers is that they will recover, like the other children in their home have recovered and get to go to Margate to live in the big house with all the other children who have beaten ‘the bug’.”
Her own upbringing in a non-conventional family also influences her writing about the children, she says.
“I think it always does haunt the margins of my writing, unconventional families, different ways of building a family and it’s something that I didn’t plan to return to in this book, but that concern is always there for me.”
Chidgey will talk about The Book of Guilt for the first time at the Auckland Writers' Festival next week, followed by the Sydney Writers' Festival, and will tour the UK before appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in August.
