Welcome to my world of books and news. My life as a writer has yielded rich and varied experiences. A writer’s imagination is fuelled by memory, stories told, research, and ultimately the imagination. I remind myself that we only have one life to draw on and not a day should be lost to its possibilities.
Please explore my site and find out more about my work.
Life Writing and Memoir Workshops
Photo by Daniel Horner
Fiona’s Life Writing and Memoir Workshops will be held on 2, 16, 30 September and 14 October, with four leading guest speakers.
More details and the enrolment form are here:
Latest book:
So Far, For Now
March 2022
RHNZ Vintage
More of my life stories, a catch-up since the last memoir, published about ten years ago. These have been busy years, marked by the writing of more books, the birth of family, widowhood, political involvement, travel, leading writing workshops, grief and joy in near equal measure. These 18 essays traverse the territory, the best I can tell you about what happened next.
….threaded through So far, for now is a theme that makes Kidman incredibly likeable: the art of rediscovering oneself, or discovering for oneself. Kidman is a traveller, an investigator, of not just others’ lives, but her own. – Kelly Dennett Stuff
Kidman emerges life-size from her words: spirited, adventurous, loud and constant in her demands for justice, quietly determined in her quest for truth, honest in her admission of vulnerability and of pain. The prose is similarly open, relaxed and familiar, almost colloquial in its tone and structure. Every essay is a lesson in fine storytelling. – Rachel O’Connor, Academy of New Zealand Literature
All the Way to Summer: stories of love and longing
(RHNZ Vintage)
March 2020
A collection that celebrates a long history of my storytelling; it brings together a variety of my previously published stories, as well as several that are new or previously uncollected. They are stories about love, one way and another, not always happy but always life changing.
Winner: New Zealand Heritage Prize for Fiction 2020
These stories span close to a century, and we can trust entirely that Kidman’s portrayal of our country through the ages is spot on… Drama, laughter, sex and bad moments. This is the truth about love. – Catherine Robertson, Landfall
…a thing of exquisite beauty—both the physical book (that Gretchen Albrecht image! That paper stock! That stitched case binding!) and of course the stories inside. – Caroline Barron Goodreads
More Pennies from Heaven (Dalriada Press) is a numbered edition of an essay written for the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Otago, where Fiona was the Irish Studies Writing Fellow in 2021.