The Black Monk

Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of eleven critically acclaimed books, encompassing novels, short stories, and memoir. Reviewers have noted her “swarming energy” and “descriptive writing of the highest order,” suggesting it would “work just as well as poetry.”

She is a winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Her story collection Opportunity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize and won New Zealand’s Montana Award for Fiction, along with the Montana Medal for Book of the Year. She was also named Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection Singularity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize and the Asia Pacific Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel The Night Book was a finalist for the New Zealand Post Award.

Her fifth novel, Soon, a bestseller in New Zealand, was published internationally. The Night Book and Soon were adapted into the TV series The Bad Seed, which screened in 2019. Her novel Mazarine was longlisted for the 2019 Ockham Book Awards. In 2021, she published her bestselling memoir The Mirror Book, which was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Grimshaw’s monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award. She was a finalist for the Canon Media Award Reviewer of the Year in 2016 and won the Voyager Media Award for Reviewer of the Year in 2018, 2019, and 2021.

Charlotte Grimshaw and her husband Paul Grimshaw, along with law firm Grimshaw & Co, sponsor the Sargeson Fellowship, which awards a stipend and residency to writers. Charlotte Grimshaw is also a literary advisor for the Sargeson Trust and has been involved in writing courses for young people run by the Michael King Writers’ Centre. She has judged the Sunday Star-Times Short Story award and the Auckland University Ingenio short story award twice each, and was the judge of the premier award of the 2014 BNZ Katherine Mansfield short story prize. She is also a literary advisor to the Academy of New Zealand Literature.

Dr. Paula Morris MNZM describes Charlotte Grimshaw as “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.” Morris notes Grimshaw’s 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.”

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