The Author

Tanya Khort is a Ukrainian writer based in Berlin. She arrived in Germany in 2022, working on her debut novel in the intervals between learning German and building a new life in the city.

Her questions have always been the same: why do people behave as they do, and what lies beneath the surface of an ordinary life? She began writing short stories, songs, and poems in search of answers, and arrived at the novel by a different route entirely: by describing, then reshaping, then finally fictionalising her own experience. What began as a private act of understanding became, over time, a serious literary project.

She considers writing not a career she chose, but a calling she recognised.

Her chief literary inspiration is Victor Hugo, whose gift for rendering human emotion at full scale gave her both a model and a catalyst. Her debut novel was written in Berlin and draws on the European city she now calls home.