Catherine Chidgey believes it was inevitable she would write a book set in Germany given her love, from a young age, for the country and its people.
Aged 16, she went on a three-month exchange to Germany as a "very naïve, Catholic schoolgirl" from Lower Hutt.
"I was plunged into speaking German every day - my host families knew that was the deal - and it was a real gift. It started me thinking on a deeper level about what language is and how we use it."
She still recalls a conversation with a host father, a farmer. "He had fought on the eastern front in World War II and once, just the two of us in the room, he talked about it. I remember thinking how strange - and wonderful - it was to talk to someone who had been a German soldier, especially when my own father, who'd been a boy during the war, still talked about Germans as 'the enemy'.
"In my writing life I am totally fascinated by the idea of dark histories in ordinary families."
Chidgey returned to Germany in 1993 armed with a degree in German literature and a scholarship from the West German government for post-graduate research which she was able to extend to 18 months.
"I lived in Berlin for three years so to make ends meet walked into an Australian restaurant figuring they'd hire a Kiwi. Oddly enough they did and oddly the restaurant was a big hit with the locals who just love the Antipodes."
As a child Chidgey experienced regular illness, writing wrote stories to pass the time, as well as devouring Enid Blyton's series The Naughtiest Girl in the School. "They used to turn up in great quantities at school galas and I'd snap them up. I also loved fairy tales and was very drawn to the gruesome ones."
In Berlin she discovered the work of English author Angela Carter, who often used dark fairytale references, and "that was when I first began to think about writing seriously".
Joining a writing group - members could write in German or English and would be critiqued in that language - was a fertile training ground. "I figured it wasn't as terrible as showing my work to someone in New Zealand so felt a sense of freedom in what and how I wrote."
Although the setting may have been inevitable, The Wish Child did however have a long gestation, much longer than anyone might have anticipated - 13 years. But Chidgey, a Katherine Mansfield Fellow in 2001, says she never stopped writing in that period, including translating children's books for Gecko Press such as Death, Duck and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch.
Truth was, she was stuck for at least some of the time, but in 2010 inspiration struck via a television documentary on World War II and she started again, ditching most of what she already had. "I was drawn to World War II as a subject but wanted to approach it in a new way, tell it using a different voice, one lost to history and definitely not the voice of the victor."
Last year culminated in the publication of The Wish Child, which has gone on to win multiple awards including the $50,000 Acorn Foundation Prize for Literary Fiction and publication in the UK and US.
Chidgey, who lives in Ngaruawahia with her husband Alan Bekhuis and 2-year-old daughter Alice, says she still has to pinch herself. "I'm really satisfied with what the book became. It's had such a dream run which I think I've felt more particularly because of the long break. I didn't know if I'd been forgotten."
Given the time it took to produce The Wish Child, it's surprising to discover that Chidgey - who has two part-time teaching jobs, one in Hamilton and one in Auckland - has a new book out in November. The Beat of the Pendulum grew from the fragments of language she met on a daily basis over 2016 - sources such as news stories, social media, street signs and conversations
"The book is an expression of how quickly life rushes past us. Alice is changing daily and at the other end of the scale I'm well aware my mother is running out of time. "I have no idea what people are going to make of the book but I hope they're as intrigued and excited as I have been. It's an invitation to be immersed in daily fragments, little treasures that I've tried to hold on to as they've galloped past."
event details
Catherine Chidgey appears at Tauranga Arts Festival on Saturday, October 21 and Sunday, October 22. Tickets from Baycourt box office or Ticketek. TECT cardholder discount available until October 6 (Baycourt only). Full programme at www.taurangafestival.co.nz