Canadian actor, screenwriter and director Sarah Polley is adding author to her impressive resume. Her first book, Run Towards the Danger, will be published in March 2022.

Run Towards the Danger is a collection of five essays that explore memory and the relationship between past and present.

"I've been acutely aware that my childhood experiences inform my current life. I have, until recently, been less conscious of the power of my adult life to inform my relationship to my memories," Polley writes in the book.

"When I was lucky enough to have experiences in adulthood which echoed pivotal, difficult memories, and to have those experiences go another, better way than they did in the past, my relationship to those memories shifted. The meaning of long-ago experiences transformed, in the context of the ever-changing present. The past and present, I have come to realize, are in constant dialogue, acting upon one another in a kind of reciprocal pressure dance."

The book, which is part of a two-book deal, will be published by Hamish Hamilton Canada.

Polley's career began when she was a young girl acting in the television series Road to Avonlea and the Terry Gilliam film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. She also starred in the films The Sweet Hereafter, The Weight of Water and Dawn of the Dead.

She turned to filmmaking in 2003 and made her first feature-length film in 2006, Away from Her. Away from Her was adapted from the Alice Munro story The Bear Came Over the Mountain and was nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

In 2012, Polley made the documentary Stories We Tell, which explored family secrets. She also made the film Take This Waltz and wrote the screenplays for the television adaptation of Alias Grace.

Her next film project is an adaptation of the Miriam Toews novel Women Talking.