Catherine Chidgey tackles the cultural obsession with thinness in 'The Starving Bride'

Catherine Chidgey is incredibly talented. 

The Kiwi author is highly acclaimed, having won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction twice. 

A theme Chidgey explores in some of her novels is that of "ordinary people who do terrible things", and it's one she explores in her most recent work, 'The Starving Bride'.  

The novel is based off a 1930s sideshow act, resurrected in the future, in which a young woman dressed as a bride would lay in a glass casket for a month without eating, in full public view. 

And although in real life, this act disappeared last century, the novel paints a comparison between the Starving Bride of old and modern social media. 

"I do include the voices of the crowd who come to see Hazel, the starving bride ... it's kind of like sitting behind a screen, you know, those keyboard warriors who think they can say whatever they want to, to other people online," Chidey told Jack Tame. 

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