A Breed of Women

Fiona Kidman is a novelist, short-story writer, and educator from New Zealand. In 1988, Kidman's novel, The Book of Secrets, received the New Zealand Book Award for fiction. Another of her works, Mrs. Dixon and Friend, was a collection of stories from 1982 that featured Brenda Dixon, a character who would be the central figure 15 years later in her novel, The House Within. Kidman taught creative writing at Victoria University Department of Extension and contributed an essay on writing to Mutes and Earthquakes, an anthology edited by New Zealand's Poet Laureate, Bill Manhire. She also participated in the 1997 Winnipeg Writers' Festival, and she received a $27,000 grant from Creative New Zealand in 1997 to write a novel. She received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to literature and the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters.