Between a busy life in academia teaching international relations and politics, including a three-year fellowship in New York, she spent several years writing her just-published first novel What Remains.

It is a stunning tour-de-force, a love story between an experienced war photographer Pete McDermott and naively idealistic junior reporter Kate Price.

Their relationship develops slowly and not always smoothly over 13 years as they encounter each other in one war zone after another. The violence, horror and moving scenes in Iraq, Palestine, South Africa, Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya have a brutal realism which sears the souls of those witnessing them. There is heartbreak yet there are also moments of hope.

“I wanted to tell the story of this AIDS hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, but I began to think it would be better in a novel rather than an academic report,” says Denise, who lives in Bilgola Plateau.

“I asked Tom Keneally how to find a story and he said you find it inside you. So I just sat down and wrote 60,000 words in three weeks.

“But the story stayed with me for several years before I took it to a publisher. I just wanted to go on playing with the characters and I didn’t want to have them rejected.

“I know many war reporters suffer post-traumatic stress and lose hope in humanity and gain it again.

“I thought I could give people the experience of war better in fiction. Fiction freed me up, although I got a lot of help from an editor who kept me focused on the lovers in each chapter. But it was a real emotional rollercoaster."