Dame Fiona Judith Kidman DNZM OBE (née Eakin; born 26 March 1940) is a New Zealand novelist, poet, scriptwriter and short story writer.

[1][2] She was the only child of Flora (née Small) and Hugh Eakin, and as a newborn baby she was briefly hospitalised with a milk allergy.

It was a feminist novel about a young woman defying society's expectations during the 1970s, with roots in Kidman's involvement in the New Zealand women's liberation movement.

[11] Due to its controversial subject matter and depictions of sex, it was banned by some schools and libraries, which led to increased sales.

[7][5] It was followed by Mandarin Summer (1981) and Paddy's Puzzle (1983, also published as In a Clear Light in the United States in 1985), both narrated by young girls growing up in New Zealand.

[12] In the 1990s her works continued to deal with serious subject matter: True Stars (1990) was a crime novel criticising New Zealand's right-wing economic policies in the 1980s, described by academic Terry Sturm as the "most important political novel" in New Zealand in this period,[13] and Ricochet Baby (1996) was about the impacts of postnatal depression on the sufferer and her family.

A review in The Dominion Post described it as "contain[ing] much potential sensation — domestic violence, illicit sexual connections, deaths and disappearances, and the desolation and venality of a country at war — but there's also a wry humour, every intense emotion and extreme event filtered through Kidman's cool precise prose".

[9] The Captive Wife (2005) is a historical novel about the kidnapping of Betty Guard in the 1830s, while The Infinite Air (2013) is a fictional account of the life of aviator Jean Batten.

[9] As part of the writing process for The Infinite Air she flew in a Tiger Moth plane to have a better understanding of Batten's experiences.

[5] Her tenth novel, All Day at the Movies (2016), is a family saga focussed on the life of women and changes in social attitudes across 55 years in New Zealand.

[9] This Mortal Boy (2018) is about Paddy Black or the Jukebox Killer, a 20-year-old Irishman who was convicted of murder after a fight with another young man at a milk bar in 1955.

[9] Kidman has said the book emerged from "an interest in how some young men live their lives, believing they are immortal, yet one terrible mistake can change everything for them and their families"; she had subsequently come across an article about Black and remembered the outbreak of moral panic about teenagers in the 1950s in New Zealand following the Mazengarb Report: "I knew I was hooked, that I couldn't get away from Albert, or Paddy, as he was known.

"[9] In addition to her novels, Kidman has published seven short story collections, including Mrs Dixon and Friends (1982), Unsuitable Friends (1988) and The Foreign Woman (1993), and six poetry collections, including Honey and Bitters (1975), On the Tightrope (1978), Going to the Chathams: Poems 1977–84 (1985) and Wakeful Nights: Poems Selected and New (1991).

[14] She is one of fifteen Fellows of the Academy of New Zealand Literature, an invitation extended to writers with "an important body of work and distinguished career".