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Uta Christensen
Author of Caught Midstream and Bed of Roses, Bed of Thorns
She comes from the Rhineland, the north-western part of Germany. Her birthplace was not near the banks of the famous Rhine River, but inland to the east of Cologne, in the heavily forested hill country, where villages hundreds of years old are nestled in secluded valleys. Her father’s family originated in Holland. An early ancestor, a Dutch pastor, came to this hill country and settled in one of the secluded valleys 200 years ago. As Uta grew up, she developed four passions—roaming the magic forests, reading literature, collecting stories of interesting people, and dreaming of traveling the world. Her passion for traveling was satisfied much later, for at first it was an adventure she was fascinated with while exploring the old family Atlas and letting her eyes and fingers roam across countries and continents. What to do with her collected stories came to her even later than her travels.
Russian literature excited her the most during her early teenage years. She immersed herself in Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Turgenev. In her search for Russian books, she found lesser known novels set in Siberia, the most forbidding part of Russia, where life was hard all year long but especially harsh during the long, dark, icy winters when food became scarce. This harshness of life fascinated her. Later she branched out into English, French, German and American literature. There was a period when she became obsessed with plays and amassed a sizable collection of them, starting with the Greek playwrights—Euripides, Aristophanes and Sophocles—and later with the German, English, French and American playwrights, all in German translations.
In her later teens, Uta became seriously interested in the English language. She traveled to Ireland and lived there for some time to develop her English skills. Joseph Conrad, the acclaimed Polish writer, inspired her to master this language as he had done to such perfection that he wrote his novels and stories in English. Returning home from Ireland and being now twenty years old, she journeyed to New Zealand, a country situated farther from Germany than any other on the globe. She always thought of this journey as one of a lifetime—six weeks traveling on a passenger ship from Amsterdam to England, then south along the Atlantic coasts of the Netherlands, France and Portugal, through the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal with an overland excursion to Cairo and the Pyramids, on through the Red Sea to Aden on the tip of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, across the Indian Ocean to Australia and across the Tasman Sea to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand.
In New Zealand she met her future husband, an American engineer and artist working on a research project for the University of Denver. They both happened to settle for awhile in the small town of Blenheim in the north of New Zealand’s South Island. They were the only single foreigners in town. They met and got married in Blenheim’s quaint Anglican Church with most of the town showing up for their marriage ceremony. Their story became the front page feature in print and pictures in the town’s daily paper.
A year later, when her husband’s contract expired, they moved to Colorado and a short time later to California, her husband’s home state. There Uta enrolled in a California State University, chose a double major in English and German literature and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction. Their family was founded when the couple had two children in short succession, a son and a daughter. A few years later, Uta assumed full-time work at the University of California at Santa Cruz as an Administrative Analyst. She wrote mainly poetry during her early married life; but eventually started her first serious prose writing project in the late 1980’s, her father’s memoir of his five years spent as a German prisoner of war in Russia after WWII. This first book was written in German at her father’s request, for he never mastered English. Caught Midstream was Uta Christensen’s first American published novel in 2006. It is the moving story of an innocent German teenager caught at the very the end of WWII by the Russian army invading Germany and sent as a prisoner of war to Russia where he spent several years in hard labor camps. Three years later, in 2009, the novel Bed of Roses, Bed of Thorns was published in the USA. It is an intricate family saga of three generations of a family, set in the first half of the 20th Century, with an embedded coming-of-age story of the novel’s young protagonist. Uta Christensen is currently writing her third novel with the title Tough As Fine Silk. It is a moving and passionate love story involving a young American and a young Chinese woman. The setting is China at the beginning of the 21st Century. It is a story of a potentially life-threatening accident; a mysterious car crash; an escape of the lovers; a journey through China’s ancient dynastic history; and a surprising ending of the lovers’ flight from pursuit.
All of Uta Christensen’s novels are based on her collected true stories. She thinks of these stories as seeds planted in her imagination, tended, watered and fertilized over the years. Through her unique way of caring for and shaping these stories, they have grown and matured into moving narratives. Her books are featured on her website www.utachristensen.com and on www.amazon.com.
Uta Christensen’s main residence is in Santa Cruz, California, but she spends four or five months out of every year in Australia, where she does most of her writing in a peaceful seaside setting.
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ABOUT: Strategic Book Group provides book publishing, book marketing, and e-book services to over 10,000 writers around the world, employing 150 people who live throughout the US and work virtually through telecommunication. Strategic Book Group is experiencing over 30% growth per year, having published approximately 3,000 authors with almost 100 new releases per month. Our books are available through Ingram, the largest book distributor in the world, as well as in bookstores, through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all online channels. Strategic Book Group attends and exhibits at the major book expositions in London, New York, China, and Germany each year.
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