NZSA announces Charlotte Grimshaw as 2025 NZSA President of Honour

NZSA's 2025 President of Honour, Charlotte Grimshaw, is newly back from Menton. She is the author of eleven works, including critically acclaimed novels, two outstanding collections of linked stories and a best-selling memoir. As a reviewer in The New Zealand Listener noted: ‘A swarming energy pervades every page she writes... her descriptive writing has always been of the highest order. Most of it would work just as well as poetry.’ Charlotte was awarded the 2024 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. She is a winner of the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award. Her story collection Opportunity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize, and Opportunity won New Zealand’s premier Montana Award for Fiction, along with the Montana Medal for Book of the Year. She was the Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection Singularity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel, The Night Book, was a finalist for the New Zealand Post Book Award. Her most recent novel, Mazarine, was longlisted for the 2019 Ockham Book Awards. Her bestselling 2021 memoir, The Mirror Book, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Non-Fiction. Charlotte Grimshaw is currently a regular reviewer and columnist for the NZ Listener. Her monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award. She won the 2018, 2019 and 2021 Voyager Media Award for Reviewer of the Year. Two of her novels, The Night Book and Soon, have been made into a TV series, The Bad Seed, screened on TV One in 2019. A compilation of The Night Book and Soon, titled The Bad Seed, was published in 2019. Charlotte Grimshaw is a literary advisor to the Sargeson Trust and to the Academy of New Zealand Literature. She has judged the Sunday Star-Times Short Story award twice, and the Auckland University Ingenio short story award twice, and has judged the premier award of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield short story prize. Commenting in the Guardian on Singularity and Opportunity Jane Campion said, "She is a master of mystery, very contemporary and astute. Her language is relaxed, spare and perfect." The Times Literary Supplement noted, "Grimshaw’s vivid descriptions... are a joy." Charlotte’s The Night Book was praised for "tread[ing] perfectly the divide between fact and fiction" (Sunday Star Times). In the same paper, Kerre Woodham wrote of it: "This is a beautifully written novel — suspenseful, topical and a wonderful study of human relationships... The characters are fabulous and the writing’s superb." "Opening the pages of Charlotte Grimshaw’s new novel Soon is akin to tilting the blinds in a dim room; the razor-like precision of her words flood your mind with crisp, searing light, such is the vivid clarity of her prose... Soon is clever and uncomfortable at the same time. Charlotte Grimshaw has a peculiar and very satisfying knack of infusing a sort of heat and energy into her pages and cultivating a low-lying sense of tension into every line. Plus she’s a connoisseur of human behaviour." – TVNZ “Charlotte Grimshaw is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished and acclaimed writers with a significant publishing record. She has few peers as a fiction writer and essayist, and as a reviewer and public intellectual. Her work for newspapers and magazines reveals her curiosity about the world, her immersion in contemporary politics and social issues; it demonstrates her clear-sighted thinking, willingness to interrogate and expose, and desire to engage with difficult topics. Her writing can be searing and fearless. Her work as a fiction writer wins literary awards and is adapted for television, a rare combination anywhere, especially for an author who is not writing commercial or historical fiction.” – Dr Paula Morris MNZM NZSA President Dr Vanda Symon says “ Charlotte Grimshaw is a writer whose works have been acclaimed across fiction, short fiction, and memoir, and who is known for her gritty and unflinching commentary on political and societal issues. We are thrilled to have her as our 2025 NZSA President of Honour."

The NZSA President of Honour delivers the prestigious annual NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Lecture - an event that comments on the literary sector. NZSA will announce details of this event in 2025. Charlotte Grimshaw's impressive body of work can be viewed here. Roll call of NZSA President of Honour