A moving story of young - and old - love.
Kate De Goldi is one of New Zealand's most loved authors, whose
short fiction, novels and picture books engage children, teenagers
and adults alike. The author of the phenomenal The 10 PM Question,
which has been published extensively overseas, she is a two-time
winner of the New Zealand Post Children's Book of the Year Award.
The 10 PM Question won Book of the Year and Best Young Adult
Fiction in the 2009 New Zealand Post Children's and Young Adults'
Book Awards, was a runner-up in the 2009 Montana NZ Book Awards,
and won the Readers' Choice Award. It was a finalist in the LIANZA
Children's Book Awards for the Esther Glen Award, was shortlisted
for the Nielsen BookData NZ Booksellers' Choice Award, and was
selected for the 2009 edition of the prestigious international
catalogue The White Ravens. She has a regular spot reviewing
children's books on Saturday Mornings with Kim Hill on National
Radio.
De Goldi has won numerous other awards, including the Katherine
Mansfield and American Express awards for short stories. She has
held several major fellowships, including the 2010 Michael King
Fellowship, and in 2001 was made an Arts Foundation Laureate. In
2011 she was winner of the Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal and
Lecture Award, which is awarded for an outstanding contribution to
children's literature. That same year she won the 2011 Corine
International Book Prize Young Readers Award, which is awarded to
German and international authors 'for excellent literary
achievements and their recognition by the public'. A respected
broadcaster, book festival chair and public speaker, she is also
dedicated and committed to working with schoolchildren. Her first
book, a series of interlinked short stories for adults, Like You,
Really, was published under the name of Kate Flannery. This was
followed by the cross-over YA novel Sanctuary, which won the 1997
Best Senior Fiction Award, and the YA novels Love, Charlie Mike and
Closed, Stranger (YA Honour Book at the 2000 New Zealand Post Book
Awards). Jacqui Colley has illustrated three of De Goldi's books -
Clubs, a Lolly Leopold story; Uncle Jack; and Billy, a Lolly
Leopold story - and De Goldi's junior novel The ACB with Honora Lee
featured drawings by Gregory O'Brien. Her novel From the Cutting
Room of Barney Kettle won the Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction
at the 2016 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.
The entry for De Goldi in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand
Literature, writing of the debut short-story collection Like You,
Really, identifies what were to become vintage De Goldi
preoccupations and stylistic approaches- 'The sense of identity
through kinship implied in the title is the unifying concern.'
Stories 'fluctuate in time' with people 'retold and revisited', in
this way compiling the family's history. Indeed, the judges of the
2009 New Zealand Post Book of the Year wrote of The 10 PM Question-
'De Goldi's winning book invites you to become part of another
family, to spend some quality time with its members, become
engrossed in the family dynamics to the point that ... this family
has now become our family, too ... The judges predict, with
reasonable confidence, that The 10 PM Question will become an
enduring classic.'
The ACB with Honora Lee explores the relationship between a young
girl, Perry, and her cranky grandmother, who has dementia and lives
in a rest home. As Honora loses words, Perry is furiously gathering
them up, and 'it's the intersection between the two which De Goldi
plays with throughout' (Waikato Times). A bond forms between Perry,
her grandmother and the staff and residents of the home as Perry
constructs an alternative alphabet book with her grandmother. The
result, Victoria Spence declared in Metro magazine, is 'sheer joy'-
'De Goldi's love of language shines brightly, word play shapes many
conversations.' North & South concluded that in this 'delicate
honeycomb of a book', 'there is not a wasted or insignificant word
... The prose is like music, with rhythms carefully crafted.' The
scenario is typical of the so-called 'sandwich generation', but as
De Goldi told The Weekend Herald the Christchurch earthquakes
coincided with putting her mother into care, which started her
thinking about 'cracks in the community and fractures in my
mother's head', but also about bonding and 'constructing meaning'
from the ruins.
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