New Zealand Writers
DE MONTALK, Stephanie
"Stephanie de Montalk writes with unusual grace... a fleeting detail, clear in itself, will suggest something beyond."
DE MONTALK, Stephanie (1945 - ) is a poet and biographer whose work has a strong narrative focus.The poems in her award-winning first collection Animals Indoors (2000) combine the exotic and the everyday, from the exotic skylines of the East to the near horizons of freshly laid concrete. Unquiet World (2001), her biography of her second cousin Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, is an account of an extraordinary and eccentric life, as well as a very personal memoir of the biographer's journey.
De Montalk was educated at the Wellington Hospital School of Nursing and Victoria University, where she was joint winner of the Original Composition prize in 1997. In the same year she was also joint winner of the Novice Writers' Award in the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Memorial Awards.
She is a registered nurse who has worked as a University hostel warden, and for ten years as a documentary film maker. She has been a Video Examiner for the Video Recordings Authority and is a former member of the Film and Literature Board of Review.
Her poetry has appeared in journals including Sport, Landfall, Southerly, London Magazine, NZ Listener and Poetry NZ - where she was a featured poet in issue XX - and in anthologies including Mutes and Earthquakes: Bill Manhire's Creative Writing Course at Victoria (1997), under the name Miller; Big Weather (2000), and a number of New Zealand Poetry Society anthologies. A small collection, Five Poems (1999) was hand-printed by Wellington artist Brendan O'Brien.
Animals Indoors (2000) is her first collection of poetry, published while she was undertaking a Master of Arts degree in creative writing at Victoria University. "I'm drawn to writing poetry which make poetic sense of common life, which balances the mundane with the mythical," de Montalk writes.
Animals Indoors won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry award at the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
"This first collection shows a mature talent and impressive poise," writes Janet Wilson in The Evening Post. "De Montalk's air of studied nonchalance effects liberation from everyday constraints even while acknowledging their existence."
In the NZ Listener Gerry Webb describes the poems as "relaxed, articulate, knowledgeable, meticulously observant, focusing on others more than on herself... what is not said between people is often more important than what is."
Unquiet World (2001) is de Montalk's biography of her cousin Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk.
Geoffrey de Montalk was one of the glittering generation of early New Zealand poets which included A.R.D. Fairburn and R.A.K. Mason. In Britain in the 1930s he became involved in a celebrated obscenity trial at which he was supported by Leonard and Virginia Woolf and many other leading writers of the day. After imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs, he became increasingly eccentric, dressing in mock-medieval garb and laying claim to the throne of Poland.
(KC.)
Updated Information
Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk was published in Poland, in Polish, by Jagiellonian University Press, Krakow in 2003. The book is also to become the subject of a Polish television documentary. The television project has been initiated by the book's translator. The documentary will have an English language soundtrack for international distribution.
The Scientific Evidence of Dr Wang (Victoria University Press, 2002) is de Montalk's second collection of poetry. Dr Wang makes narrative sense of the alchemy of everyday life and, in accordance with his status as an expert witness, presents his testimony with clarity and precision.
Stephanie de Montalk was the 2005 Victoria University Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
De Montalk's third book of poetry, Cover Stories, was published by VUP in 2005. Her lastest piece is writing is a historical novel, The Fountain of Tears (Victoria University Press, 2006).
Related Links
- Selected texts may be purchased in a variety of ways through our Purchase New Zealand Books page.
- Turbine: an interview with Stephanie de Montalk
- Sport
- Turbine
