Literary Salon #22 – Catherine Chidgey

Warm your mind, body, heart, and soul with a night of literary discussion! Stanza 22 will feature multiple award-winning author Catherine Chidgey.

Catherine teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato and in 2019, with sponsorship from the university, she conceived the Sargeson Prize short story competition – New Zealand’s richest short story prize.

Some of Catherine’s other accolades include the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters. She has held the Sargeson Fellowship, the Todd New Writers’ Bursary, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship (France), the Rathcoola Residency (Ireland), the NZSA Beatson Fellowship and the University of Otago Wallace Residency, and she has been Writer in Residence at the universities of Canterbury, Otago and Waikato. As well as having translated many children’s picture books from the German, she published her own children’s book, Jiffy, Cat Detective, in 2019.’

Catherine will be discussing her latest novel Remote Sympathy, which was shortlisted for the fiction prize at the Ockham New Zealand book awards and has been a bestseller since its release.

Set in Buchenwald concentration camp, Remote Sympathy explores our capacity for willful blindness via the story of a part-Jewish doctor forced to treat an SS officer’s wife for cancer. ‘With its multiple registers and complex view of humanity,’ writes Publishers Weekly (USA), ‘this marks a vital turn in Holocaust literature.’ The Times (UK) has just chosen it as one of the best historical novels of 2021.

In this salon, Catherine will talk about and read from Remote Sympathy, and will discuss the challenge of researching such a complex story. She will also talk about her new novel, The Axeman’s Carnival – which is narrated entirely by a magpie.

Come along to this inspiring and interesting evening for writers and readers to meet and converse!

Tickets are $15 General Admission including a glass and some nibbles. Available online or Door Sales at The Meteor on the night.  

We look forward to seeing you there!