Ockham NZ Book Awards: The Axeman’s Carnival wins Catherine Chidgey best fiction prize

Catherine Chidgey. Photo / Ebony Lamb

“I’m very superstitious,” says Catherine Chidgey. The winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for fiction – valued at a cool $64,000 – at this week’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards dressed up for the occasion in green satin and 1920s macasite jewellery, carrying a sparkling vintage evening bag. Dangling from the bag: tiny silver acorns.

Chidgey carried this bag to the 2017 book awards, where she won her first Acorn Prize for historical novel The Wish Child. But when she was a finalist again in 2021 for her novel Remote Sympathy, Chidgey couldn’t find the silver bag anywhere. She didn’t win that year.

Luckily, in time for this awards ceremony she found the bag again. “It had slipped behind a shelf of photo albums in the cupboard of my study. I took them out to find some pictures of Mum to show at her funeral last May, and there it was.”

Now Chidgey has a bright orange acorn to sit next to the blue version she won in 2017, currently displayed next to her grandfather’s fossil collection. “They’re in a glass cabinet that belonged to my great-grandfather,” she says. “He ran a pub in the South Island. It was the dessert trolley!”

The Axeman’s Carnival is an engrossing and topical story set in high-country farmland. Its narrator is opinionated magpie Tama, a bird raised in the home of Marnie and her husband Rob, who’s a champion axeman. Chidgey admits to an obsession with research: her husband, Alan Bekhuis grew up on a high-country sheep station, and she “gleaned many details from him”, including “the gut hole, where carcasses are dumped; the name Wilderness Road; the ticking of the electric fence; and the hiss of the gas flame when cauterising lambs’ tails”. She “lifted” real experiences for her character Rob – like “picking mint for money; dressing up as a cowboy as a child and pretending to shoot the superphosphate man” – “from interviews with a very patient Alan.”

Chidgey also interviewed farmers and “a wood-chopping commentator”, but the creation of Tama the magpie, however, “the bridge between the domestic and the wild” in the novel, is a bold imaginative feat – and a complete success. Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction judges’ convenor Stephanie Johnson describes the book as “poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish”.

It’s exactly 25 years since Chidgey won the Hubert Church prize for best first work of fiction at the 1998 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, for her debut novel, In a Fishbone Church. “I remember standing among the crowd at the Auckland Town Hall, waiting for the announcement,” she wrote earlier this year for the Academy of New Zealand Literature. “I wore a long gold dress and velvet jacket, both made by my mother.”

Catherine Chidgey after the announcement she was the winner of the Jan Medlicott prize for best fiction. Photo / Marcel Tromp

Her UK publisher is about to re-issue that debut, and Chidgey feels nervous about her “apprenticeship novel” stepping into the limelight again. There’s also a certain melancholy. “In a Fishbone Church was based partly on my mother’s life, and I know how proud she was of the book’s success. She kept it beside her bed, and often read sections of it over the years, even as she entered dementia. When she died last year I found the bookmark showing the shortlisted titles marking her page in her copy, and the programme for the awards tucked away with her precious mementoes.”

This week, before Chidgey left her Ngāruawāhia home to travel up to Auckland, her late parents were on her mind. “Their wedding photo hangs in my study, so I blew them a kiss,” she says. “I felt they were with me tonight at the book awards.” Also on Chidgey’s mind in was the donor for the prize, Jann Medlicott, who died last August. “She was a lovely, warm and encouraging presence,” Chidgey says, sad that Medlicott never got the chance to read her novel. In endowing the prize in perpetuity, Medlicott “had such vision. She called all the Acorn Prize winners ‘her writers’.”

Chidgey’s parents “always said it didn’t matter if you win as long as you do your best”, and she feels The Axeman’s Carnival represents just that. With its iconic local setting, the novel also offered a fresh engagement with New Zealand readers. “After two novels set in Nazi Germany, I’ve returned to home territory,” she says. “It feels like I’m back.”

The Axeman's Carnival by Catherine Chidgey.

For a writer who seems so prolific and driven, Chidgey had a long fallow period. Her third novel, The Transformation, was published in 2003, but it was 13 years before her next book, The Wish Child, appeared. Chidgey is candid about the reason for what she calls her “wilderness years” and “long silence” as a writer. “It was depression related to infertility,” she says. After a succession of frustrating IVF treatments, followed by the decision to find a surrogate, Chidgey and Bekhuis welcomed daughter Alice, now almost 8 years old.

Motherhood is “exhausting but exhilarating”, Chidgey says, as Alice scampers around the book tables set up for the Auckland Writers Festival, thrilled that she has managed to dance into shot during one of her mother’s post-award interviews. (“I’m going to be on TV!” Alice announces.) Bekhuis tells me he is thrilled about Chidgey’s win, because her punishing work schedule is so taxing. “She stays up late and gets up early, and she misses out a lot on family life.” The Axeman’s Carnival is dedicated to Bekhuis and to Alice, “my little chick”.

The support of Bekhuis – as well as her ferocious work ethic – means Chidgey can hold down her full-time job as a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato, where she teaches creative writing, and also continue to write novels. “The Wish Child was 13 years in the making,” she says. “I was still finding my feet. But now I have my writing mojo again.” In fact, Chidgey’s next novel, Pet, will be published in two weeks’ time, and she says she “already has another book” in progress.

“This,” she says, gesturing at the mingling book awards crowd, “is my social life for the year.”