Fiction Panel

Creative Waikato Big Space

131 Alexandra St, Hamilton

Wednesday 17 August

6.30pm

Come along and hear from our NZ fiction panellists Charity Norman, Deborah Challinor, Julie Thomas and Thom Conroy in conversation with chair Kirstine Moffat.

Charity Norman was born in Uganda, the seventh child of missionary parents, and brought up in draughty vicarages in Yorkshire and Birmingham. After several years’ travel she became a barrister in the Northeast of England, specialising in crime and family law. Also a mediator, she’s passionate about the power of communication to untie knots, and recently worked as a volunteer telephone listener with Lifeline. She practised law for fifteen years but in 2002, realising that her three children had barely met her, she decided on a change of career and moved with her family to New Zealand. Novels include: Freeing Grace; Second Chances (After the Fall in UK), selected for Britain’s Richard & Judy Book Club; The Son-in-Law; and The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club choice. Charity's books have been translated into several languages. Her fifth is due out in February next year.

Deborah Challinor has a PhD in history and wonders whether she'd keep writing books if she couldn’t go walking around The Rocks in costume, hanging over the side of tall ships being seasick, or down underground mines scared rigid by claustrophobia, or striding across old battlefields at the head of ghost battalions. Deborah has four books in her Convict Girls and Children of War series and is currently editing the fourth book in The Smuggler’s Wife (Kitty) series, called The Cloud Leopard’s Daughter, due out this November. She has four standalone fiction titles Fire, Isle of Tears, Union Belle and My Australian Story: Vietnam as well as two nonfiction books Grey Ghosts and Who'll Stop The Rain? She will be presenting a workshop at the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference in August.

After spending thirty years as a writer, producer, director and executive producer in the media, Julie Thomas made a life-changing decision in 2011. She sold up her Auckland home and moved south to the lovely rural town of Cambridge. After being rejected by many publishers, Julie self-published her first novel, The Keeper of Secrets as an ebook by uploading her novel to Amazon and Smashwords and over the next ten months it sold fifty thousand copies. In mid-2012 she was contacted by HarperCollins USA who published her novel, The Keeper of Secrets in 2013. Her subsequent books are Rachel’s Legacy, Levi’s War and Blood, Wine, Chocolate that ventures into the territory of crime fiction and black comedy and features several innovative ways of despatching the ‘bad guys’ and plenty of glorious wine and chocolate.

Thom Conroy is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University and a fiction writer whose most recent novel The Salted Air was published in June. His historical novel The Naturalist was published in 2014. His fiction has been recognized by Best American Short Stories 2012 and has won various other awards, including the Katherine Ann Porter Prize in Fiction and the Sunday Star Times Short Fiction Competition.

This event is supported by HarperCollins and Poppies Bookshop with books for sale and signing. This is a free event and you do not need to book.