The 2005 Victoria University Writer in Residence has just been announced, and it’s to be the poet and memoirist Stephanie de Montalk. Interesting career path, this girl: she’s previously worked as a nurse, a documentary filmmaker and censor.

During 2005 she will be writing a novel based on two separate stories, one set in the Crimea in 1750, the other in Southern Russia in 1821.

De Montalk’s first poetry collection Animals Indoors won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award in 2001 and her third volume, Cover Stories, will be published by Victoria University Press early next year.

In 2001 VUP also published Unquiet World, de Montalk’s biography of her eccentric cousin Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk. The book was praised by Michael King as ‘a book of outstanding interest and merit’, and the Times Literary Supplement remarked that

Stephanie de Montalk succeeds in bringing her implausible relative to plausible life. His various exploits on the worldwide stage are set in a meticulously researched analysis of the context of their times, and in openly acknowledging a complex and shifting personal relationship with her quarry, she charts the subjectivity that must go into the making of any biography.

Looks like the impending novel will be worth the wait.