Writers on Mondays: A Home in this World

Overview

Writers on Mondays is a free weekly event held every Monday from July 14 until September 29, 2014. Each week local and international writers, screenwriters and poets like Peter Cox - who wrote Insider's Guide to Happiness, Mexican-born Michael Schmidt who founded two poetry presses in the UK, and ex-TVNZ US correspondent Tim Wilson talk about the work and inspiration involved in putting those ink blots on paper.

In the last of the Writers on Mondays series, Ian Wedde (The Grass Catcher), Helena Wisniewska Brow (Give Us This Day) and Stephanie de Montalk (How Does It Hurt?) grapple with the ideas of home and exile in creative fiction writing.

In his most novel The Grass Catcher Wedde ventured that "we are all at home in places constructed as narratives, and in selves who act like characters in those narratives." The Blenheim-born poet has worked as an art critic for The Evening Post, co-edited The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Poetry, was awarded an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours, for services to art and literature.

Wisniewska Brow's Adam Prize-winning Give Us This Day is a chronicle of her Polish father's exile to New Zealand.

De Montalk did her PHD in Creative Writing on the internal exile of the chronic pain sufferer through writing. Besides being a respected poet, novelist and biographer, De Montalk has also worked as a filmmaker and nurse.