Katja Rudolph

Katja is at work on her fifth novel. Her first, LITTLE BASTARDS IN SPRINGTIME, is published by HarperCollins Canada (2014), Pena Yayinlari in Turkey (2014), and by Steerforth Press in the U.S.A (2015). It received a starred review in Kirkus and was very well reviewed generally.

LITTLE BASTARDS IN SPRINGTIME tells the story of Jevrem Andric who survives the Siege of Sarajevo when he’s a boy. He immigrates to Toronto as a teenager in the mid-90s with what remains of his family. Disoriented by peace and a strangely placid culture, he embarks on a violent rampage, gets locked up in juvie, then escapes west across the vast North American continent away from the repeating patterns of his violent past.

A Bosnian reader of LITTLE BASTARDS wondered whether Katja was from the former Yugoslavia herself - a big compliment, gratefully received. But, no, she was born in Sussex, England, and moved to Canada with her family when she was seven. She uses her imagination, a lot of research, including first-person accounts, and a deep love for her characters to achieve verisimilitude. The World War II stories she heard from her parents and grandparents form the foundation of her interest in war trauma and spiritual, cultural, geographical displacement. All her books deal with the pathos of being human, the small and large injustices that lead to suffering, inflected with bright, warm glints of human kindness, open-hearted curiosity, generosity of spirit.

Katja lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, with her wife and two daughters. In a former life, she spent many happy years in university libraries, earning an MPhil from King’s College, Cambridge, and a PhD from the University of Toronto, both in social and political science.