Award opens US doors for Catherine Chidgey

The country's richest literary prize draws a line to Wellington from Iowa via Nelson and Las Vegas, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

Novelist Catherine Chidgey was still floating slowly down to earth two days after it was announced that she was the inaugural winner of this country's biggest literary prize, the $60,000 Prize in Modern Letters.

Chidgey, whose first novel, In a Fishbone Church, won the 1998 Best First Book Award in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and whose second, Golden Deeds, was runner-up for the Deutz Fiction Medal in the 2000 Awards, won this latest award over three other finalists: novelist Charlotte Randall, dramatist Briar Grace-Smith and poet James Brown.

The story behind the award is almost stranger than fiction and involves invisible threads of chance and luck linking New Zealand's literary scene with the glittering lights of Las Vegas, and the famed Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.

The money is provided by American businessman Glenn Schaeffer whose company, Mandalay Resort Group, of which he is president and chief financial officer, owns about a mile of the Las Vegas strip, including casinos such as Luxor and Mandalay. Schaeffer has more strings to his bow than just business. He had at one point been an aspiring writer - quite a good one probably, as Bill Manhire from Victoria University's Institute of Modern Letters points out.

Good enough, at any rate, to be one of only 20 (among thousands of applicants) selected for the extremely prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop some years ago, same class as Jane Smiley.

He got his masters degree in creative writing with a novel that Manhire describes as comic and realistic but then decided to put his powerful imagination to different use, and turned to business.

In the process of making and spending money he bought a house in Nelson, and quite a bit of wine-growing land as well, and then, in his 40s, reached a moment in his life where he wanted to give something back.

Luckily for Victoria University, Schaeffer decided that the Institute of Modern Letters (the Victoria University institute is linked to the United States institute of the same name) was the perfect foil for his considerable philanthropy, and so the Prize in Modern Letters was born, which Schaeffer will continue funding every two years. (He has benefited the institute in many other ways as well.)

The great thing about the prize, as Chidgey points out, is that because it is judged by a panel of American judges selected by the Institute of Modern Letters in the United States, it represents a valuable link between our writers and the vast American market.

'Schaeffer's thinking is that it will take an emerging New Zealand writer and a range of others in the slipstream," Manhire explains - a geological rather than cataclysmic change which, coupled with the Iowa Writing Workshop's arrangement to each year take the top MA graduate from Manhire's creative writing programme, will see our upcoming writers increasingly connected into the American literary and publishing scene.

In the here and now, however, Chidgey admits her plans for the considerable sum are "very boring - I'll put it in the bank and live off it."

She's been writing full-time for a while already, but it has been a tenuous existence, lurching from royalty payment, to book advance, to the odd injection of prize money.

She will, however, buy herself an object to commemorate the prize. When she won the 1998 Montana prize she bought a beautiful old oak desk to work at; this time she thinks she'll buy a lamp (an old one - she loves antiques) to illuminate the writing.

Her third novel, about a French wig-maker who flees Paris to settle in Florida in the 1890s, is in its final stages, but won't be seen for at least a year. She wants it released simultaneously here and overseas, so is waiting for overseas releases of her existing books to catch up.

Its title? She doesn't know yet, has come up with about 40 titles herself, all turkeys, and is hoping one of her various publishers will read it and have a eureka moment.