Nick Monsarrat
For many years, Nick Monsarrat was a newspaper reporter, editor, editorial writer and college-level journalism teacher. He has been writing novels since 1996.
His first published fiction appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine shortly after graduation from Washington & Lee University.
Born in Westport, Conn., and a graduate of Kent School, his newspaper career included service in the U.S. Air Force from 1963-1967, where he was assigned to Clark Air Base in the Philippines as a reporter, writing about the Air Force’s jungle survival school, air rescue operations, and base hospital’s pioneering work with Vietnam wounded. The experience brought him face to face with the intrinsic cruelty of warfare and the extraordinary humanitarianism of ordinary servicemen and women tirelessly working for good off the battlefield.
A resident of Vermont since 1968, Monsarrat served variously as a statehouse reporter, managing editor of the state’s second largest daily, editorial page editor of Vermont’s largest daily, and the Vermont stringer for Time magazine. In the 1980’s, he helped inaugurate and lead a ground-breaking exchange of New England and Soviet newspaper editors. He won numerous editorial-writing awards and for ten years taught news writing and editing in the Journalism Department at St. Michael’s College. For more than a decade, he also appeared regularly on Vermont commercial and public television programs as a news-panel member and commentator and helped moderate televised political debates.
In 2009, he helped launch VTDigger.org, an online investigative news site dedicated to in-depth coverage of Vermont politics and news. Most recently, he was featured in an award-winning Vermont Public Television documentary entitled “Headline Vermont,” based on his writing about the history of newspapers in the state.
He is an avid horseman who divides his time between his Vermont and Florida farms with his wife, Barbara Ann Curcio, also a writer, editor and avid equestrian.
A cousin of the same name was the author of “The Cruel Sea” and more than two dozen novels published between the 1940’s and late 1970’s.