Ink runs in blood for award winner Charlotte Grimshaw

Charlotte Grimshaw follows in the footsteps of her father, C.K, Stead. Picture / Listener

Ink runs in the blood for author Charlotte Grimshaw, winner of this year's prestigious Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction.

The Auckland-based writer won the award for her short story Plane Sailing, praised as a "beautifully constructed and marvellously oblique piece of short fiction" by competition judge Kevin Ireland.

Her father, New Zealand big man of letters C K Stead, won the award 45 years ago.

Though her father assisted her in practical matters, advising her on agents and how to deal with publishers, how or what to write were not matters for filial discussion, she said.

"I do my own thing. I have my own name. I am my own man, as it were," she said.

Growing up in the Stead house was a source of constant stimulation, she said.

It was a house where books and reading were always topics of lively discussion, providing fertile ground a young mind.

She chose to take up the pen in London, after a brief foray into the legal world.

"I was a lawyer with Simpson Grierson for two years. I decided that it wasn't for me pretty quickly," she said.

She went to London and had two children. It was there she began writing seriously.

Already an established author of three critically acclaimed novels, Grimshaw said the award was encouraging.

"It all helps with selling books."

It will look good on the back of her soon-to-be-released collection of short stories, she said.

She netted $10,000 for winning the premier category .

The winner of the novice award of $1500, Emma Gallagher, said she had no time to the consider what the award would bring.

Gallagher was completing her Masters of Arts in creative writing at Bill Manhire's writing course at Victoria University in Wellington. It was during a writing workshop exercise the ideas that became her winning entry, Little Grandfather Clock, clicked into place.

Part of a small Wellington theatre company, the page was not all that different from the stage, she said, and the jump was not too hard to make.

"Theatre is all about telling story as well. It just takes place physically," she said.

Epsom Girls Grammar schoolgirl Kirsti Whalen, winner of the Katherine Mansfield Young Writer Award worth $1500 for herself and $1500 for her school, had already received national recognition in the Bell Gully poetry competition.

She intended to continue developing her writing at university next year.

"I think there used to be the whole tall poppy thing. But really, I think people look down on you more if fail than if you succeed," she said.

She won her category for her story, called Postcards.

All three of the winning writers cited Katherine Mansfield as an influence.

"In terms of atmosphere and economy of prose, she is the absolute master," Grimshaw said.

Other previous Katherine Mansfield Award winners included Maurice Shadbolt, Vincent O'Sullivan, Frank Sargeson, and Keri Hulme.

- NZPA