Catherine Chidgey with her Ockham winning novel The Axeman's Carnival. Photo: Marcel Tromp
This week, Ngāruawāhia-based writer Catherine Chidgey won the top prize for The Axeman's Carnival at the Ockham book awards - and she already has a new novel on the way.
The winning novel reveals the disintegration of a marriage from the unique viewpoint of a magpie and was described by judge Stephanie Johnson as "poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish."
Chidgey has a new novel Pet soon to be released, which follows a 'teacher's pet', wrestling with her admiration for that teacher.
She spoke to Kim Hill about the novel, which will be available in stores on June 8.
A psychological thriller, most of Pet is set at a Catholic primary school in Wellington in 1984 and is narrated by a 12-year-old girl called Justine who is infatuated with a glamourous new teacher, Mrs Price.
As the title suggests, Mrs Price plays favourites - inviting a select group of girls around to her house and taking them for drives in her convertible.
"But there are also sections set thirty years later when she's an adult and she's returning to those days in her memory and wondering how what happened happened and what her role in it really was," Chidgey says. "Memory, misremembering is a huge thread in the book."
Justine also has epilepsy, which adds to her confusion around the events of the novel.
"Before and after a seizure people with epilepsy are quite foggy around the events that have taken place and that's the case for Justine, which is what feeds her uncertainty throughout the book."
The theme of memory continues in the parts of the novel set in 2014, where Justine is struggling with her father's dementia diagnosis.
Despite having authored two previous novels set in Nazi Germany, Chidgey says Pet might be her darkest book yet.
"This is a book that builds a sense of creeping dread and you're not quite sure who you can trust or who to believe," Chidgey says.
"This is pretty sinister because it's about how we possibly can't trust the people we most admire, or the people who are closest to us."
And it ends in a way that may leave readers also unsure of what the truth is.
"There is a lingering question mark and I think you can take the ending in two different ways, and so can the narrator Justine ... it's hard to talk about that without giving it away."
While Chidgey had a 13-year hiatus between her third novel The Transformation (2002) and her fourth, The Wish Child (2016), the author has been making up for lost time - while Pet is soon to be released, she already has another novel with "a pretty decent draft finished".
To be titled The Book of Guilt, it's set in a version of the UK in 1979, at a mysterious boys' home.
"I'm dipping my toe into dystopian fiction with this one, so its another gear shift," she says.
And while writing, teaching at the University of Waikato and being a mother takes up nearly all of her time, Chidgey says she does have time for one guilty pleasure - Married at First Sight.
"It's undemanding and I find it strangely fascinating. It might work its way into a novel one day."
