Stephanie de Montalk is the award-winning author of four collections of poems, including Animals Indoors, which won the 2001 Best First Book Award, the novel The Fountain of Tears, the biography Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, and How Does It Hurt?, a memoir and study of chronic pain. Described by Damien Wilkins as 'groundbreaking and riveting and beautiful', How Does It Hurt? was published to critical and medical acclaim, and received a Nigel Cox Award at the 2015 Auckland Writers' Festival. It was published as Communicating Pain: Exploring Suffering through Language, Literature and Creative Writing by Routledge in 2018. Stephanie was the 2005 Victoria University Writer in Residence, and she lives in Wellington.