Charlotte Randall
Charlotte Randall is one of sixty authors who attended The Press Christchurch Writers Festival from September 4th to 7th, 2008
Born in Dunedin and author of five novels, she has managed to collect some impressive awards and praise in her career. Her first novel, Dead Sea fruit, won the South East Asian/South Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Reed Fiction Award in 1995.
Her second novel, The curative, the story of a man incarcerated in Bedlam, was joint runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana NZ Book Awards and it has been adapted successfully for the stage.
Within the kiss, the next novel, was a clever retelling of the Faust story against a tennis background and it was followed by What happen then, Mr Bones, a fascinating story that tracked the members of a family in Petone in 2002 back to Oxford, England, in the 1650s.
Her latest novel The crocus hour begins in Crete where a young man on holiday meets a Kiwi whose daughter had gone missing there two years ago. The search for the girl occupies the first part of the book and the second half is set in New Zealand and follows the father and the daughter’s friend. It’s a compelling and imaginative novel and it confirms yet again that Randall is one of our most interesting and unpredictable novelists.
