Dame Fiona Kidman, legend, has a new book out today. All the Way to Summer is a memory lane of beloved stories, ending with a new one that is leaving readers sobbing. Here, in an essay especially for The Spinoff, she looks back on her life of love. During World War Two I lived on … Read more
Last week, Dame Fiona Kidman won the 2019 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for her eleventh novel. Her first, A Breed of Women, was published 40 years ago in 1979. Here, you can read the opening chapter. A Breed of Women is a frank portrayal of what it was like to be a woman in small-town New … Read more
A memoir by Dame Fiona Kidman on the occasion of a new, posthumous book of poems by her “beautiful friend”, Lauris Edmond. The other day I was talking to a friend at a book launch, and somehow we got into one of those exchanges about who the greatest poets of the twentieth century were. Auden’s name came … Read more
Among the protesters who gathered last week to oppose the sealing of the Pike River mine was the great New Zealand author Dame Fiona Kidman. Here she explains why more must be be done to retrieve the bodies of the 29 men killed in the 2010 disaster. The drive from Greymouth to the Pike River … Read more
New verse by Wellington writer Dame Fiona Kidman. Man weeping A man walking down a road, his shoulder muscles packaged tight as boulders under his shirt, a thick set handsome man, all sinew and brawn. I knew this man, stayed under his roof more than once or twice. Until then I had not seen a … Read more
Fiona Kidman reviews the essay collection Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner Everywhere I Look is Australian writer Helen Garner’s latest collection of essays and, like much of her former work, it’s not lacking in controversial aspects. Her early writing was like entering a soothing bath of recognition, a woman who understood the suburban condition and … Read more
I love Joe Bennett’s columns. King Rich is his first novel and much of it absolutely sings. It’s also the first novel that I’m aware of to emerge from the Christchurch earthquakes. The time that’s elapsed since the first quake in February 2011 has eclipsed that of World War 1 and will soon overtake that of the second World War. … Read more