Deeds to match Chidgey's steely ambition

By GILBERT WONG books editor

Catherine Chidgey plans to complete not one, but possibly two novels in Menton next year.

This week the young Auckland novelist was awarded the 2001 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship that comes with about $50,000 and the use of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Room to write in at the Villa Isola Bella in the south of France.

Chidgey has known about the fellowship for almost a month, "I've been keeping my mouth shut with great difficulty," she says.

Her second novel, Golden Deeds, published this year, might have been runner-up at the Montana Book Awards, but Chidgey is not the sort of writer to rest upon her laurels. In conversation Chidgey is natural and honest, though one senses that behind the easygoing words lies a certain steely ambition. She has said that she wanted to have two novels published before she was 30. That can be ticked off. Before the end of 2001, she hopes to complete at least one of the two novels she is working on.

Unwilling to tempt fate, she won't say a word about either - "They're too half-formed right now" - and is prepared only to indicate that she launched into her third the day she finished Golden Deeds, and that the fourth novel grew out of ideas she had when researching the third.

" I find it quite comforting to have something waiting in the wings. I am the kind of writer that needs to put things aside for a period of months and then go back to them afresh. So I will be able to alternate my work with these ones."

She takes no breaks between novels, launching into the next as soon as the previous has been sent to the publisher.

"It's partly for discipline and partly because I wouldn't want to be in the position of having a novel come out and be waiting for reviews. It's about not wanting all your eggs in one basket really. There's nothing you can do about how a novel is received, so you might as well be starting with the next."

To date she has had little reason to worry, leading a charmed writing career. Her first book, In a Fishbone Church, won best first book prizes in the Commonwealth writers and the Montana book awards. She has received a number of the country's most well-regarded writing fellowships and Golden Deeds was runner-up to Owen Marshall's Harlequin Rex in this year's Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

She has heard from Stephanie Johnson, presently in Menton, who describes the room as lovely and cool with a charming garden - a fine place to write - with the Villa Isola Bella deserted apart from the New Zealand presence. The fellow lives in an apartment in nearby Menton, about a 30-minute walk away.

Chidgey, who will stay in the south of France with her partner Greg Campbell, a commercial pilot, relishes the space and time the fellowship represents. She has never successfully written in her own house and in Auckland has an office, provided for partly through the generosity of AMP Asset Management.

" I don't have the motivation to write at home. I've tried and every time the house is never so clean, the cake tins have never been so full of baking. At home there's always something else to do. At my office I don't even have an internet connection because it's so distracting."

For now she hopes her university-level French, which she has not used in years, returns and reflects that there is a certain synchronicity in the award. She's 30 and so is the Katherine Mansfield fellowship.