User:Chocmilk03/Amy McDaid

Amy McDaid is a New Zealand nurse and author. Her debut novel, Fake Baby (2020), won the Sir James Wallace Prize for the best manuscript in the University of Auckland's Master of Creative Writing programme, and she has since received the Todd New Writer's Bursary to support her work on her second novel.

Life and career
McDaid is of European and Rarotongan descent. She works at Starship Hospital as a neonatal intensive care nurse. She completed the Master of Creative Writing programme at the University of Auckland in 2017 under Paula Morris, and worked part-time on her debut novel for four years before its publication. For the draft of her novel she won the Sir James Wallace Prize, awarded to the most outstanding manuscript in the university's creative writing programme.

Her debut novel, Fake Baby, was published in 2020 by Penguin. It is a darkly comic satire about three people experiencing grief, loss and mental illness. Reviewer Sam Brooks for The Spinoff wrote: "By the end of Fake Baby, [McDaid has] also shown us, with delicate detail and real generosity, the truth that even a small kindness, a silent memorandum of care and understanding, can lift someone up above the surface, even for just one more day. It’s those daily kindnesses that build up to a life loved, and finally, a life lived." Catherine Robertson for Landfall said that McDaid "pulls off a bravura balancing act of near-farcical comic delivery and intensely moving content".

Fake Baby was longlisted for the top fiction prize at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and shortlisted for the prize for best first book. It was named by The Listener as one of the best 101 books of 2020. Steve Braunias writing for Newsroom named it as one of the ten best novels of the year.

In 2020 and 2021 McDaid was a judge for the Sunday Star-Times short story competition. In 2021 she took part in a collaboration between Auckland Hospital and the University of Auckland, called "Literature in Situ", in which she presented on her experiences in medicine and her literary work.

In 2021 she received the Todd New Writer's Bursary, funded by the Todd Corporation and Creative New Zealand, to work on the draft of her second novel, currently titled Black Kite.