Stephanie de Montalk is the author of a biography, a novel, a memoir and five books of poetry. She has an MA (Dist.) and a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington. A former nurse, documentary filmmaker and member of the NZ Film and Literature Board of Review, she came to writing late, in her fifties, as family and work commitments lessened. Since that time she has been the recipient of multiple awards. Guy Allan observed: ‘Stephanie de Montalk writes with unusual grace,’ and Gerry Webb wrote that her work is ‘relaxed, articulate, knowledgeable,’ and ‘meticulously observant’. In 2003, Stephanie suffered an accident resulting in permanent nerve damage and intractable pain. From this point on, her writing has explored exile, isolation and constraint. Reviewing her treatment of these themes in Vivid Familiar (poetry, VUP, 2009) Hugh Roberts wrote: ‘de Montalk continues to grip us … with the probing intelligence and nervous energy of her language’.

Stephanie has been published in literary journals in New Zealand and abroad. Her accolades include joint winner of both the VUW Prize for Original Composition and the Novice Writers’ Award in the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Awards (1997), the Jessie Mackay Award for the Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana NZ Book Awards (2001), a Top Ten and a Top Four NZ Book (2001), a Favourite NZ Book (2002), a Best NZ Book (2009), a Best Book (2014) and a Nigel Cox/Unity Books Award (2015). In 2005, Stephanie was the Victoria University Writer-in-Residence.

The poems in Stephanie’s new collection As the Trees Have Grown (2023) engage with the world as if through a window – cloaked, distanced, and guided by the movements of the seasons, the weather, and always, trees. As Stephanie seeks a cure to the life-changing limitations of her physical self, she finds something close to solace in dreaming.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Victoria University Press author page

‘Life on the Opium Couch’: an interview for Folks Magazine (2016)

Interview with Stephanie on National Radio (2014)

For publications, further reviews and excerpts visit Stephanie de Montalk’s website