Public accolade rewards a private act of faith

By MARGIE THOMSON

Winning the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards is an event that, temporarily at least, has filled up all the corners of Auckland novelist Stephanie Johnson's life.

It has brought a house full of flowers, an answerphone full of messages, an inbox full of emails, an influx of friends bearing champagne, and best of all, a feeling of enormous validation that what she does alone, staring at a blank screen and turning inward to her imagination, makes a difference to the world and is done well.

So, even two days after the big night at Jade Stadium in Christchurch on Tuesday, Johnson is just as you would expect to find her: happy, talking cyclonically, excited to show off the elegant Terry Stringer-designed award that sits amid the cards and children's drawings on her Grey Lynn mantelpiece proclaiming "Words Fly" and engraved on the back with her name and the title of her novel.

The Shag Incident is based on the notorious 1984 abduction and terrorising by feminists of Auckland playwright and academic Mervyn Thompson.

The win guarantees Johnson's version of the story further sales, and a Wellington film company Big House has bought the options and work is at a preliminary stage. Johnson has been asked to write the script.

Writers are possibly more fragile people than most, so the win would have been intensified by Johnson's missing out three times before: The Heart's Wild Surf was entered for the Booker Prize but did not make the running at all in New Zealand; and she was shortlisted at the Montanas for both The Whistler and Belief.

The award ceremony was the culmination of an emotional day for Johnson, who almost decided not to attend the event. A close friend had died a few days before and his funeral was on Tuesday afternoon.

She had spent the previous few days "bawling my eyes out", and had to be persuaded by her publisher to attend.

Johnson spoke at her friend's funeral at the Purewa Chapel in Meadowbank, grabbed her handbag and leaped into a taxi to catch her plane.

Considering her list of achievements (Menton fellowship, Auckland University literary fellowship, among others), her famous distress at the 2001 awards when Belief lost to Lloyd Jones' The Book of Fame, and her opinionated, sometimes haughty demeanour, she will raise many eyebrows with her declaration that she is not a natural winner.

But who would judge another? Johnson spent her childhood on crutches and in wheelchairs as she underwent operation after operation to fix a congenital problem that in past generations would have left her crippled.

Often alone, she was shaped by her misfortune in ways good and bad.

Most notably, it directed her towards writing and made her a "sociable loner", as another writer put it, giving her the stamina for such a solitary activity.

Johnson says she felt "delighted, but guilty" when she won the fiction prize because Fiona Farrell's The Hopeful Traveller was good and Owen Marshall's short stories, When Gravity Snaps, were lovely.

"I'm not used to winning, having not played sport.

"I've been shortlisted so many times, I had put myself in this headspace that it doesn't matter.

"It was really only the next day, suffering the effects of having drunk far too much whisky, that it sank in - I've won it ...

"The lovely thing about it is that the book will have another edition and hopefully we'll make some money from it, me and the publisher. And, of course, there's that lovely cheque."

The Deutz carries a prize of $15,000, which Johnson may spend taking husband Tim and their three children on an overseas trip, possibly to Spain.

She's working on a novel set in New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s, is workshopping a play, has nearly finished enough short stories for a third collection, and is about to release her second volume of poetry, Moody Bitch (out next month).

Writing is "my greatest pleasure".