Catherine Chidgey: The Starving Bride

Described by the 2026 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate panel as "without a doubt one of New Zealand's most important living writers", internationally bestselling author Catherine Chidgey returns to Verb to discuss her tenth enthralling novel. The Starving Bride is an urgent and searing story set in near-future England.

Dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job and estranged from her parents, Hazel Whitlock signs up for a sideshow act in Blackpool. The seaside resort has revived all the cancelled old favourites and she will be the Starving Bride. On display in the iconic Blackpool Tower, with a ravenous lion prowling the enclosure, Hazel must lie in silence while strangers view her body.

Join Catherine and Kate Camp for a special one-night event as they discuss the many layers of The Starving Bride, writing female experiences and the questions the book raises about spectacle, desire, survival and society's obsession with beauty.

Unity Books will be at the event bookselling and Catherine will be book signing.

Cover artwork by Max Thompson. Cover design by Todd Atticus. Author photo by Ebony Lamb.

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, for her 2016 novel The Wish Child, the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize.

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. Catherine's two most recent novels are the critically acclaimed Pet (2023) and The Book of Guilt (2025), also published by John Murray.

Catherine lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.

Kate Camp is the author of many collections of poems, including The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (winner of the 2011 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry) and How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), and a collection of essays, You Probably Think This Song Is About You (2022). Her most recent book is Makeshift Seasons (2025), a new collection of poetry. Kate was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington.