 Tess Regrave. I've worked at the university in a variety of roles for about 12 years. In 2013 I did the Masters of Creative Writing and from that I already had a piece of writing but from that has come this novel gone to Pegasus which has just been published. Go back to 1998. I had two young kids, it's living in Auckland and I wanted an adventure and I went off down to Stuart Island and joined a sea kayaking group down to the bottom of right hand corner of Stuart Island to Port Pegasus. Port Pegasus is most remote harbour in New Zealand I think, there's no civilisation there whatsoever. It's wild, it's got mountains called Gog and Magog and Bald Cone, they've all lost their tops because of the roaring 40s winds that blast in there. We camped in Kayak and we heard kiwis at night and when explored an old tin mining operation and I spent a lot of that trip dreaming and I started dreaming up a novel, a story that I wanted to write and somehow I lit a pilot light that has never gone out from there. One of the other original aspects of this novel is I had a great grandfather that came out to New Zealand from Scotland in 1877 and he had died by 1892, left a wife and five children and had always been covered up in my family as what had happened to him. In fact, I found out that he had died in Ashburn Hall as a 32-year-old and I was intrigued to understand what had happened there and why it had been so buried and I started writing about him in Dunedin and I put him in Secliffe, Lunatic Asylum and then I realised I couldn't have a novel just about a madman, it was going to be so depressing so I started looking at his wife and my wife had been very involved with the temperance movement. After he died, she was apparently a Godfaring Bible holder for the rest of her life and she lived into her 90s so then I had her and him in the novel as characters but I realised you've got to get drama and interest and I realised I still needed more and I needed a foil for her she was going to be this straight-up temperance woman so I had this woman Grace come from India to New Zealand who already knew a lot about suffrage and was a fair supporter of suffrage and I put those two together and it was fireworks. It's 1892 in Dunedin and that's the year before women won the vote in New Zealand and there's gathering momentum to separate the temperance movement which was getting men to stop drinking basically and the franchise movement which was purely petitioning Government to give women the vote and there was a big meeting in Dunedin which is in my novel which is about the separation of temperance and franchise and the franchise union is formed in Dunedin. Well, my early background was journalism and I'd learnt, I'd written a lot of features and I'd learnt how to research and I knew papers passed really well which is a huge historical resource in New Zealand and I spent hours, I had screeds, suitcases full of research on tin mining and the suffragettes in Dunedin's history and I had the start of a novel but it was chunked full of research and it was just cluggy and I applied to the creative writing course and was very fortunate that Michelle Leggett who's also interested in 19th century woman picked it up and she was one of the mentors on the course that I was going to be on in 2013 said I want to do this. Michelle was very intuitive to work for and she just sort of helped me shake all the research loose and get to the bones of the story and make the story work in quite a poetic way. She thought that I had the character from India there who's called Grace and becomes another name later in the novel. She thought she was far too good to be the minor character that we had and so really with Michelle's help I made the two women characters, the two main characters. He was often C. Cliff Luna took asylum so that has ramifications further down the novel and he is an important part but it became these two women and it was really Michelle that helped me do that and we actually went overboard after I finished the creative writing course I looked at it and I thought there's too much of Grace she's taken over. She's taken over my novel so I had to go away and pull her back again. In journalism you give all the information you've got up front you throw it at the reader. A novel you give them a tiny little bit and then you hold a lock back and then down here you give them a tiny little bit more and a tiny little bit more so that you create the sense of pull and narrative pull and mystery and intrigue that draws your reader through and I learnt a huge amount from her and she was particularly good because she is essentially a poet and a journalist working together two completely opposite ways of approaching a piece of writing so I learnt about when to give and when to hold back and that was I can't thank Michelle enough it was wonderful working with her and she's still there and interested but it's my novel now. The hardest part of this novel has been listening to all the different advice I've got and help and working out what is right for me and where is my voice and I think if I come away with anything it's knowing my voice now and I will take that into whatever I do next whether it's fiction or non-fiction.