A bit of a spat is brewing, it would seem, between grande dame novelist Fiona Kidman OBE, (right) and young upstart Charlotte Grimshaw, the winner of the 2000 Buddle Finlay Sargeson Writer’s Fellowship.

Grimshaw’s review of Kidman’s Songs from the Violet Café was published about a month ago in the Listener. At the time, we commented that, "One can usually rely upon Listener writers to tell it as it is - and Grimshaw doesn’t pussyfoot around."

Kidman sent the Listener a letter objecting to Grimshaw’s negative review. She attributed it to a disagreement that reputedly took place 13 years ago - when Grimshaw would have been 24 and Kidman 50. This week, Grimshaw (left) has responded, again through the letters page:

The suggestion that I would, or could, use the Listener as a vehicle for my own malice is extraordinary and wrong. I tried hard to like the novel, and the fairly negative review is simply the product of my honest, careful, respectful, literary scrutiny.

Grimshaw is supported by a letter from her Remuera neighbour Mac Jackson. Jackson (right) is a colleague of Witi Ihimaera’s from the English Department at the University of Auckland, and writes:

Grimshaw's reservations about the novel were temperately expressed, quite specific and backed by detailed references to the text and by quotations from it. "The story is conjured with eagerness, with energy," she concluded, while wondering whether we might "be better able to believe in it if its tone were more rigorous and authentic, its humanity more closely observed". These sound to me like the remarks of an astute reader, engaged in the proper business of criticism.

Looks like the making of a good old fashioned literary feud to us. Grimshaw, the author of Provocation and Guilt, has a third novel due out soon - about a stalker and unrequited love. We wonder if Listener books ed Steve Braunias would be mischievous enough to give it to Kidman to review?