Join Charlotte Grimshaw, the award-winning, bestselling author of The Mirror Book, for an exploration of her new work of fiction, The Black Monk. Described as a "daring novel", The Black Monk is part psychological thriller, part family saga, that examines the themes of the moment: shame, addiction, truth and the stories we tell to survive.
While her brother Cedric spirals into addiction, Alice Lidell finds herself confronted not only by his decline, but by memories of the past. From their chaotic Auckland childhood to her present day life, Alice is haunted by a mysterious figure she calls the Black Monk.
Wellington audiences will be among the first to hear Charlotte discuss the making of this extraordinary new novel as she sits down with Kiran Dass.
Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of eleven critically acclaimed books to date, encompassing novels, short stories, and memoir.
A reviewer in The New Zealand Listener noted: ‘A swarming energy pervades every page she writes . . . her descriptive writing has always been of the highest order. Most of it would work just as well as poetry.’
She is a winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Her story collection Opportunity was shortlisted for the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Prize, and Opportunity won New Zealand’s premier Montana Award for Fiction, along with the Montana Medal for Book of the Year. She was also the Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection Singularity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize and the Asia Pacific Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel, The Night Book, was a finalist for the New Zealand Post Award. Grimshaw’s fifth novel, Soon, a bestseller in New Zealand, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Anansi in Canada and the United States. These two novels were made into a TV series, The Bad Seed, which screened on TV One in 2019. Her novel Mazarine was longlisted for the 2019 Ockham Book Awards. In 2021 she published her bestselling memoir The Mirror Book, which was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Her monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award. She was 2016 finalist in the Canon Media Award Reviewer of the Year, and won the 2018, 2019 and 2021 Voyager Media Award for Reviewer of the Year.
About Kiran Dass
Kiran Dass is a critic, writer and Programme Director at WORD Christchurch and has written about books, music and culture for a variety of publications including NZ Herald, The New Zealand Listener, The Guardian, The Wire, North & South, Metro, The Spinoff, RNZ, Sunday magazine, Sunday Star-Times and Vice. In 2020 she was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre Residency, and in 2023 was the Verb Wellington Writer in Residence at Katherine Mansfield House & Garden. Dass was a judge for the 2024 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was convening judge for the same prize in 2021. She reviews books regularly on RNZ’s Nine to Noon.
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