New Zealand Writers
REIDY, Sue
The tensions within feminism and other modern ideals are challengingly presented.
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
REIDY, Sue (1955– ), is a fiction writer distinctive for her complex treatment of female identity and spirituality.
Born in Invercargill and trained in graphic design at Wellington Polytechnic, she has worked as a practitioner and teacher of design and illustration, providing the illustrations for her own stories.
She won the Bank of New Zealand Katherine *Mansfield Award in 1985 for her story ‘Alexandra and the Lion’. The short stories in Modettes (1988) are set primarily in South-East Asia, defying notions of realism by shifting between reality, dream and fantasy with an often humorous directness of tone. The tensions within feminism and other modern ideals are also challengingly presented, for instance between natural sexual impulse and resentment of gender roles, or between correct received opinions about other cultures and the damage actually inflicted by intruders, however well intentioned. Asian belief systems are portrayed with unusual inwardness.
The novel The Visitation (1996) is also concerned with spirituality and responsibility, this time in the context of 1960s New Zealand Catholicism. Its two-sisters story sets the traditional mythology of the Virgin Mary against the antipodean context, as modern Catholicism frustrates a message delivered by divine vision. The novel is again at times magic realist, at times humorous, and often enriched by strong visual and musical senses. It is published by the English Black Swan company.
RR
Updated Information
Reidy's second novel, Four Ways to be a Woman was published by Transworld in Britain, Australia and New Zealand in August 2000.
Sue Reidy was awarded a 2000 Buddle Finlay Sargeson Writers Fellowship.
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