Miriam Frank

Miriam Frank was born in Barcelona, Spain, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, from a German mother who fled Hitler, and an American father who emigrated as a child from Lithuania to New York, and transferred to Spain following his war service in counterintelligence. As Spain fell to Franco, two-year-old Miriam was moved to France, where she spent the next 3 years in hiding until her mother obtained a passage for them to Mexico in the midst of WW2. Following her primary schooling in Mexico, they moved again to join another branch of her mother’s dispersed family in New Zealand, where Miriam completed her education and went on to graduate in medicine. Back in Europe, she settled in London, gained the Fellowship in her field, was appointed senior lecturer and consultant at the Royal London Hospital, married Rudolf Kortokraks, an artist and former assistant to Oskar Kokoschka, helped him establish an art school in Italy, and gave birth to two daughters. She also moved on from her scientific writing to more literary forms with her translations of Latin American and Spanish authors and finally to her own writing. She is the author of 'My Innocent Absence' (Arcadia Books, 2010), longlisted for the PEN-Ackerley prize for a literary autobiography of excellence, and 'An Unfinished Portrait' (Gibson Square Books, 2017), which have received high praise in the British and foreign press and been translated into French (Éditions De Fallois) and Greek (Kapon Editions). 'A Turbulent Stillness, in a Day in the Time of Covid' is in progress.