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Guilt, Freedom, & Delirium: Panel 

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Author

Friday 8 August, 6:30 - 8:00pm

The Atrium, Wintec City Campus

Free Event, no registration required.

Panellists Catherine Chidgey and Carl Shuker join chair Damien Wilkins in conversation about their best-selling, prize-winning novels The Book of Guilt, The Royal Free and Delirious.

 

This event is sponsored by Wintec and Te Herenga Waka University Press and supported by Poppies Hamilton with books for sale and signing.

Photo: Ebony Lamb

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Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific). In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book in the LA Times. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. She lives in Cambridge and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. Her 2020 novel, Remote Sympathy, was shortlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Axeman’s Carnival (2022) won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, she followed this with the critically acclaimed Pet (2023). Her most recent novel is The Book of Guilt, which has received widespread acclaim, is a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick for 2025 and is being published in New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Author 

Carl Shuker is a former editor at the British Medical Journal and currently manager of scientific publications at Te Tāhū Hauora Health Quality and Safety Commission. He is the author of six novels – The Method Actors (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), winner of the Prize in Modern Letters in 2006; The Lazy Boys (Counterpoint & Penguin, 2006); Three Novellas for a Novel (2008; Mansfield Road Press, 2011), Anti Lebanon (Counterpoint, 2013), A Mistake (Te Herenga Waka University Press & Counterpoint, 2019), which has been adapted for film, and The Royal Free (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024 & Counterpoint, 2025), which was longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. He lives in Wellington with his wife Anna Smaill and their two children.

Photo: Ebony Lamb

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MC & Author

Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books. His first novel, The Miserables, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1994, and he has been longlisted three times for the Dublin Literary Award. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award from the Whiting Foundation, New York, in 1992, and an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award in 2013. Aspiring was the winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020. He is a professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Pūtahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. As a musician and songwriter, he writes and records as the Close Readers. His latest novel, Delirious, won the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, New Zealand’s richest literary award.

Photo: Ebony Lamb

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