KEY POINTS:
A few weeks before this year's winners of the New Zealand Montana Book Awards were announced, finalist Charlotte Grimshaw was spared the suspense.
The Auckland writer was going to be overseas for the presentation ceremony on July 21 and had been secretly told in advance she had won the Montana New Zealand Book Award Medal for fiction or poetry, for her short story collection, Opportunity, and, in an impressive double whammy, also reviewer of the year.
For a writer who says she's "the type to die a thousand deaths if I have to get up and give a reading", you can't help thinking the trip to Europe, far away from the winner's limelight, was a case of good timing.
Not that Grimshaw is shy. She is congenial, always to the point, sometimes disarmingly so, and seems perfectly comfortable with letting a reporter and photographer into her Remuera home. But she is not a natural reveller in the spotlight and has the slightly aloof air that suggests the place she most wants to be is observing others or hard at work writing. Congratulations on her double win are met with a simple "thanks" and the acknowledgment that "it's a great thing to have on your CV".
The CV is fairly glowing these days. Grimshaw has written three well-received novels, Provocation, Guilt and Foreign City. The first two were published in Britain, as well as in New Zealand.
She has won the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for Literature, the Sunday Star Times short story award and, two years ago, the Katherine Mansfield Award. And in September she was one of four finalists for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story competition, one of the world's richest and most prestigious short story prizes.
The 41-year-old mother of three children, aged 15, 13 and 8, also reviews books for the Listener, and is a columnist on Auckland for Metro magazine.
She could be forgiven for a crow about adding the Montana prizes to the list. But that's not her style. "So it's a very nice tribute and I feel a great sense of satisfaction. But I will just carry on doing what I've been doing."
What Grimshaw says she is interested in doing is "making a portrait of my own city and the people in it. But the main thing is to tell a good story".
Opportunity is a collection of stories about a host of different characters, nearly all of them Aucklanders. Each story is told as a first-person narrative and, although they stand alone, there are connections that tie them together.
Characters reappear, the same event is told from someone else's point of view. "I think of it as a novel because it's all connected, I think of it as a novel with a really large cast of characters," Grimshaw says.
An unloved private schoolgirl leads a life of crime and ends up running a brothel. She appears in another story of a wide-boy entrepreneur. A house-hunting couple view the home of one of the other characters, a writer, who in another story runs into her old nemesis at a writers' festival.
In the superb title story, a Christian woman, hurt by her policeman flatmate in her student years, gets the sudden, chilling chance for revenge. Many of the characters are outsiders, loveless, cheating or being cheated on, regretful, deluded.
A surprisingly motley bunch for a Remuera mum to conjure up. "That's the tension as a writer, obviously what you do is stay home all the time. But you really need to get out of the house, to have a depth of material," Grimshaw says. "I want to look at everybody. It's not only the poor who are interesting, it's not only the rich who are interesting. Everybody is interesting."
There's also a criminal element to many of the stories. "But that's because I live with a criminal lawyer [husband Paul]." Grimshaw has a law degree herself, working as a commercial lawyer for a couple of years before discovering it wasn't her thing.
"I wanted to write about the New Zealand voice and I wanted to have many different voices because that was the exercise," she says. "There's a theme of opportunity and, obviously, opportunism. Really, I am just interested in people's motives ... you can have a lot of subtle debate about moral questions and questions of free will when you are looking at people's motivations.
"So I wanted to look at what makes people do what they do, what makes them do things to other people. What makes them cruel, or kind, or whatever."
Opportunity has been described as a "dark, edgy, dissection of contemporary city life" and "an unsentimental, unsettling and sometimes very funny book". Herald reviewer David Hill called it a book of "verbal, intellectual and physical energy, and riddling and rewarding". There has been criticism, too, for the stories having a forbidding hardness and for some of the structural devices as verging on the irritating.
But the accusation of hardness is "an incorrect reading", Grimshaw says. While she might portray tough characters, she aims for a tone that is humane, not judgmental. "[I'm] not putting on some toughie bravado. That would be naff."
Another label put on her work that she doesn't like, is "noir". "I might write about people who are disadvantaged or whatever, but that's not in order to play on something gruesome or dark. Those people and places exist and sometimes it's interesting to have a look at them.
"But I don't like some notion that I assume a voice that is noir or tough. I would think that would be dorkish. Naff. Not my thing."
Her prose has been much admired, however, for being "diamond hard, glittering and unflinching".
"I always think, less is more. I don't like a mushy style. I don't like lush, overwriting, writerly writing, stream of consciousness, or something that's all effect. I am also very much controlling what I'm doing, I am really thinking about what I'm doing, I am really concerned about technique."
Perhaps that's where those accusations of hardness come from. "I don't think of it in terms of being tough, I think of it as clarity," she says. "I am aiming for the aesthetic, I'm aiming for beauty - if that doesn't sound completely wanky. I am aiming for something that is beautiful prose."
Her concerns with style and technique are perhaps something she has in common with her father, the eminent writer, critic and academic, C. K. Stead. But that suggestion is met with an "I don't know" and then a "maybe". Encouraging any parallels between the two is another area which, understandably, is not her thing. But if you have met them both, it is hard to ignore a family resemblance: a slightly austere appearance belied by a down-to-earth and amiable manner. She is as direct, and ready to rigorously defend her opinions.
Of reviewing, she says: "I have never shied away from saying what I think, so if it comes to having to say what I think, I just do it. I really think you have to be absolutely honest ... you have to be very cautious and very humble, careful and I don't like glib reviews or smarty reviews. But I will absolutely say what I think."
She's as frank on the rigours of appearing at writers' festival. "It's agonising. I always find it really nerve-racking. It's worth doing because you meet other writers. It's one of those things, you hate it but you are pissed off if they don't ask you."
Grimshaw has already written a sequel collection to Opportunity, which has been picked up by publishers Jonathan Cape in Britain, and she is well into another novel. "It's kind of a strange idea, if you ever read it, you will think, that's a strange idea. I am quite pleased by it actually, having thought it up, but we'll see."
As with the Montana awards, she is happy to admit a sense of satisfaction and a sense of achievement. But then it's back to business. When I ask her to sign my copy of Opportunity, she seems a bit surprised, then wonders what to say. Some writers add a message when they sign books but with its risk of insincerity, this wouldn't be her thing. I ask her to simply sign her name.
