Catherine Chidgey  Catherine Chidgey (born 8 April 1970) is a New Zealand novelist and short-story writer. 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; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. She lives near Hamilton in New Zealand. Catherine Chidgey was born in Auckland and grew up in the Hutt Valley. She attended St Michael's Primary School in Taita, and Sacred Heart College, Lower Hutt. At Victoria University of Wellington she completed a BSc in Psychology, and a BA in German Language and Literature. In 1993 she was awarded a DAAD scholarship to study at the Freie Universität Berlin. She returned to Victoria University in 1997 to complete an MA in Creative Writing under Bill Manhire. Her debut novel, "In a Fishbone Church", was published in 1998 and was widely praised in New Zealand and overseas, winning the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book of Fiction at the New Zealand Book Awards in 1998. The writer Nick Hornby said "Catherine Chidgey is a wonderful new talent, and "In a Fishbone Church" marks the beginning of what promises to be a glorious literary career." Louis de Bernières called the novel "warm, subtle and evocative. You will be thinking about it long after you have finished reading." In 1999 "In a Fishbone Church" won Best First Book at the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (South East Asia and Pacific Region). It also won a Betty Trask Award for a first book (UK), and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Her second novel, "Golden Deeds" - a tale of murder, mystery and Meccano - was published in 2000, and was runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 2000 New Zealand Book Awards. It was published by Picador in the UK and by Henry Holt in the US (under the title "The Strength of the Sun"), where it was a 2002 Notable Book of the Year in "The New York Times" Book Review, and a 2002 Best Book in the "LA Times" Book Review. The "Times Literary Supplement" called it '[m]agnanimous and merciless, a work reminiscent at times of darkest Atwood ... A witty and melancholy alchemy of heat and chill, a work of craft and fluency, which revitalizes the book in all its guises ... for those who love books, Catherine Chidgey is a find.’