I am a writer of fiction, but history is my passion and my material, a treasure trove of stories into which I dip and from which I construct my narratives.

I’ve published three novels. Necessary_Lies (Dundurn 2000) tells a story of a Polish immigrant to Canada who returns to the country of her birth to confront her past. Garden of Venus (Harper Collins 2005) is an 18th century tale of an extraordinary Greek woman who transformed herself from peasant to countess and who lived through the tumultuous events of Polish and European history. And my newest, The Winter Palace (Doubleday, January 2012) tells the story of Catherine the Great’s rise to power through the eyes of her Polish confidante and spy.

When I was writing the historical sections of my first novel, I felt a visceral, personal connection to the events I described. World War II may have ended before I was born, but the ruins were still around me, the half-burnt houses, the craters left by bombs, the warnings of unexploded mines. To find a similar connection with the 18th century was much harder. Sure, many of the palaces where my characters lived their lives still exist, albeit transformed by later generations. Museums are still filled with everyday objects they had or could have had in their possession. But this doesn’t quite translate to a personal connection.

With dashing Sophie Glavani who became Countess Potocka it was one short letter in the Krakow archives. Sophie wrote it in Berlin, in 1822, when she was dying of cancer. The words were simple—thanks extended to a dear friend—but what touched me were the shaky, almost illegible letters, the different shades of ink showing when she tired and could not press the quill hard enough. I saw her then, vivid and human, and the writing could begin.

The Winter Palace took me to St Petersburg where I followed in Catherine’s footsteps. I visited her palaces, her gardens. I stood by her gave, reflected on the many portraits and statues of the great Tsarina, looking in vain for an angle from which I could approach her. And then on my way back to Canada, my aunt told me that ever since the last partition of Poland, my ancestors had been subjects of the Russian tsars.

“Look,” she said and showed me a silver cigarette case with my grandfather’s name beautifully engraved in Cyrillic alphabet. For—before Poland regained independence in 1918—my paternal grandfather had served in the Russian Imperial Army.

This is when I began hearing my narrator’s voice.

Eva Stachniak was born in Wroclaw, Poland. She moved to Canada in 1981 and has worked for Radio Canada International and Sheridan College, where she taught English and humanities. Her first short story, “Marble Heroes,” was published by The Antigonish Review in 1994, and her debut novel, Necessary Lies, won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 2000. She is also the author of Garden of Venus, which has been translated into seven languages and The Winter Palace; a novel of Catherine the Great which will be published in January of 2012. Stachniak lives in Toronto, where she is at work on her second novel about Catherine the Great.