FIND OUT MORE ABOUT DEBUT HISTORICAL FICTION AUTHOR:

JULIA LEVITINA

In 1983, the year my debut novel is set, I was a young mother working as a theatre designer in Moscow. A descendant of Ukrainian Jews, and a Refusenik who detested her country of birth, I used to go to Sheremetyevo International Airport and fantasise about breaking free. I dreamed of being the matriarch who changed my family’s destiny by escaping the USSR.

As a teenager, I had attended an English language school that catered for the children of government officials and diplomats. The life of the privileged few left me incensed. There was no equality in the USSR – the newspapers and TV had lied. The ability to speak English opened the world for me but I needed to be careful. I listened to the Voice of America hiding under a blanket so the neighbours wouldn’t report me.

I arrived in Australia in 1991 with my family, two children and $200 to my name. I was accepted into a Postgraduate Design course at University of Technology Sydney and soon found a teaching job. While teaching set and costume design, I wrote short stories. My short story E-Love was acquired by Radio National.

In 2022, the Australian Society of Authors shortlisted my unpublished manuscript, The Girl from Moscow, for the Commercial Fiction prize and I soon found an agent and a publisher.

These days, I am researching and writing my next novel, set in the Soviet Union and the Australian outback in 1927, a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution.

I live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs with my Australian-Canadian First Nation husband. My hatred for the evil empire that oppressed and attacked the land of my Jewish ancestors is unabated.