Charlotte Grimshaw

Charlotte Grimshaw (born December 1966) is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer, columnist and former lawyer.

She has written both fiction and non-fiction, often drawing on her legal experience.

Her short stories and longer works often have interlinked themes and characters, and feature psychological and family dramas.

Grimshaw was born in Auckland in December 1966.

She is the daughter of well-known New Zealand author and academic C. K. Stead and his wife Kay.

She has an older brother and younger sister.

Grimshaw graduated from Auckland University with degrees in law and arts.

She worked first for commercial law firm Simpson Grierson, and then for a criminal barrister, taking part in murder and manslaughter trials, before leaving the law to write fiction.

While working at Simpson Grierson she met her husband, Paul Grimshaw, and chose to take his last name when they married, in part to separate herself from her father's work and to make her own way as a writer.

They have three children.

Since the publication of her debut novel Provocation (1999), she has received a number of significant literary awards including the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2000, the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction in 2006 and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 2023.

Grimshaw's first novel, Provocation (1999), drew on her experience as a criminal lawyer.

The novel received positive reviews both in the United Kingdom (where it was first published) and in New Zealand.

Catharina van Bohemen, reviewing for the New Zealand Review of Books, praised Grimshaw's "sense of humour, her delight in words, her ability to create atmosphere through evocative descriptions of the weather and the landscape, and the novel's strong conclusion", and said these strengths outweighed "occasional quibbles that there are too many characters or that nearly all the men's eyes are bloodshot".

A review in The Times said Grimshaw "shows a level of accomplishment unusual in a first time writer, her shiny diamond-hard prose suiting her subject matter perfectly", and called the novel "a deliciously dark treat".

It was shortlisted for the Creasey First Crime Fiction Award at the 1999 Crime Writers' Association Awards.

Her second novel, Guilt (2000), followed the lives of four characters in Auckland in 1987.

Her third novel, Foreign City (2005), as split into three parts: the first about a young New Zealand painter living in London, the second about her daughter's life in Auckland and the third set in a fictional city.

One reviewer commented that the book "could have degenerated into a mess", but Grimshaw's "deft hand with characterisation, irony and wit and an eye for deviant behaviour makes gripping reading".

Her short-story collection Opportunity (2007) won the Montana Award for Fiction and the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry at the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

She has also won awards for her book reviews and column writing.

Grimshaw's first collection of short stories, Opportunity, was published in 2007.

The collection was a series of short stories that could be read separately, but which have interlinked themes and characters.

Grimshaw described it as "a novel with a large cast of characters ... each story stands by itself, and at the same time adds to the larger one".

Opportunity was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and won the Montana Award for Fiction and the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2008.

The judges' comments said: "By turns touching, funny, dark, and redemptive, this is a book for reading through then re-reading in a different order, for following clues, for setting aside and thinking about, and for getting lost in."

Her second interconnected short-story collection, Singularity, a companion volume to Opportunity, was published in 2009.

Singularity was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and for the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Her subsequent novels, The Night Book (2010), Soon (2012), and Starlight Peninsula (2015), further explored the cast of New Zealand characters and settings from her collections Opportunity and Singularity, including in particular David Hallwright, a National Party Prime Minister, and his friend Dr Simon Lampton, an obstetrician.

The Night Book was shortlisted for the fiction prize at the New Zealand Post Book Awards, and Starlight Peninsula was longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel in 2016.

Reviewer Siobhan Harvey said: "This stunning novel not only brings an authentic conclusion to the knotted lives of its knotted characters, but also continues to provide the 'star-spangled Kiwi metropolis' slant Grimshaw brings to the epic contemporary serial."

Grimshaw has said that in writing Opportunity and its successors she wanted "to explore our many and varied New Zealand voices, accurately, without sentimentality", and that she was inspired by La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s linked novels and stories.

Her seventh novel Mazarine was published in April 2018.

The book is about a woman, the novel's unreliable narrator, whose young adult daughter seems to have gone missing in Europe.

In 2019 her novels The Night Book and Soon were adapted for television by TVNZ into the TV series, The Bad Seed.

The novels were also republished by Penguin Random House as a compilation volume titled The Bad Seed.

It was longlisted for the fiction prize at the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Grimshaw has described the novel as being "all about fake news. About not being allowed to be "selfie". About false narrative. Loss of the self. The fragmented self. Authoritarian rule."

Charlotte Graham-McLay in The Spinoff described it as "at once domestic drama, psychological thriller — underscored with a buzzing note of menace about global terrorism and the surveillance state — and a sort of sensual coming-of-age tale".

In The Mirror Book (2021), a memoir, Grimshaw writes about her childhood and family relationships growing up in the Stead household.