Charlotte Grimshaw was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2000. In 2006 she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award for Short Fiction. Her story collection Opportunity (Vintage, 2007) was short-listed for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand’s premier Montana award for fiction in 2008, along with the Montana medal. Singularity (Vintage, 2009) was short-listed for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Prize and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her latest novel is The Night Book (Vintage, May 2010). She lives in Auckland.

See also: New Zealand Book Council page

 Books

'It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and that caused her to turn her mind, as she did now, harried and nervous, to the past. And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.' Roza Hallwright leads a quiet, orderly life, working at her publishing job each day, returning home to the large, comfortable house she shares with her politician husband David and her two stepchildren. But this peaceful existence is about to be changed forever. In the next few months there will be an election, and, if the polls are correct, Roza will become the Prime Minister's wife. She has faced the prospect with relative calm, but a chance encounter with party donor Simon Lampton sparks a chain of consequences that will bring turmoil to both their lives, sending them into a dangerous re-evaluation of the past and of the uncertain future before them. Award-winning writer Charlotte Grimshaw has turned her unflinching eye on contemporary New Zealand society in this intricate and elegant novel. Sharp, moving, brimming with insight and observation, The Night Book is at once a meditation on power and politics, and an intensely humane look at the choices people make as they struggle, against the odds, to maintain love and integrity in their lives.