About

Charlotte Grimshaw's best-selling memoir, The Mirror Book, was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award.

New fiction for 2026 is the novel, The Black Monk, a psychological thriller and the last in the series of linked fiction that began with the story collection, Opportunity.

Charlotte Grimshaw was the 2025 President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Her 2025 Janet Frame Memorial Lecture can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/nz-society-of-authors/nzsa-live-charlotte-grimshaws-2025-janet-frame-address

Charlotte Grimshaw was awarded the 2023 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. She has been awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. Her short story collection Opportunity was short listed for the Frank O'Connor International Prize, and Opportunity won New Zealand's premier Montana award for fiction, along with the Montana medal for Best Book of the Year. She has been the Montana Book Reviewer of the year.

Her story collection, Singularity was short listed for the Frank O'Connor International Prize and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The Night Book was one of the three fiction finalists in the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award.

Charlotte Grimshaw was awarded Reviewer of the Year at the 2018, 2019 and 2021 Voyager Media Awards.

Charlotte Grimshaw is a literary advisor to the Sargeson Trust, which awards the Ireland Wilson Sargeson Fellowship to New Zealand writers every year.

Stories from Charlotte Grimshaw's collections have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Sharp Sticks Driven Nails, edited by Philip O Ceallaigh, The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories, edited by Paula Morris, Essential New Zealand Short Stories edited by Owen Marshall, Some Other Country, edited by Bill Manhire and Marion McLeod, The Best New Zealand Fiction vols 2,3,3,4 and 6 edited by Fiona Kidman and Second Violins and Lost In Translation, edited by Marco Sonzogni.

In Grimshaw's novel Soon, a sequel to The Night Book, she revisits the lives of some of the best characters in her popular story collections, Opportunity and Singularity. Soon, which was described by Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape as "a wonderful novel; a really penetrating and intense look at a certain group of powerful people in a small country" was published by Random House by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by House of Anansi in Canada.

Starlight Peninsula expands the plot lines developed in Soon, and introduces a whole new set of characters too.  

Grimshaw's novel, Mazarine, was published by Penguin Random House in 2018. Set in Auckland, London, Paris and Buenos Aires, Mazarine is a literary thriller about families, terrorism, surveillance and disconnection in the lead-up to the election of Trump.

Grimshaw's novels The Night Book and Soon have been adapted into television series The Bad Seed, screened on TVNZ. The Night Book and Soon have been republished as an omnibus edition by Penguin Random House, titled The Bad Seed.

Charlotte Grimshaw’s new fiction for 2026 is the novel, The Black Monk, the last in the series of linked fiction that begins with the story collection, Opportunity.