Biography

 Bio (short version.)

Katia Novet Saint-Lot is the author of Amadi’s Snowman, illustrated by Dimitrea Tokunbo (Tilbury House, Publishers), and Elliot’s Pen Pal, illustrated by Andy Rowland (Benchmark Education). She thrives on diversity, and feels very privileged to have a family hailing from France, Spain, Haiti, and the US, two beautiful daughters, an overworked husband who regularly forgets to call home, and an expatriate life that has taken her to seven countries and counting. A translator by trade, she tries to carve more time for her writing, and is currently trying to place her YA novel set in India (where she lived 6 years) and a Picture Book set in Haiti. She’s also working on several picture books, each set in a different country, and a new YA historical novel project.

Something more “all over the place” (like me.) 

Procrastination could be my middle name – the real one sounds even uglier than that; unapologetic dreamer – “always in a cloud” figured in practically all my school reports throughout the years and still holds true (I discovered recently another label for that: ADD); inexhaustible traveler forever researching the next destination; hopelessly uprooted, confused about my mixed-up identity, but wouldn’t have it any other way; teen-me spent hours singing La Traviata at the top of her lungs in her strawberry hot pink bedroom; allergic to exercise when it’s not dancing to good music (Latin, Flamenco, Zumba, and I recently fell full head and heart into Tango) or lots of drums that lift me off the floor (especially Sabar from Senegal); cannot watch a sad movie or read a sad book without shedding buckets of tears; I will clean and iron, but avoid cooking as much as I can – I’m lucky that my husband is a great cook; I love roller-coasters; I have been an assiduous obsessive reader ever since I could string letters together to form words and read The Three Musketeers at least two dozen times. Etc, etc, etc.

Long version.

I was born in Paris, France, most likely under a traveling star. My mother is Spanish, my father is French, and I grew up speaking both languages. As a child, I felt ambivalent about this. I never liked drawing attention to myself, but my mother’s poor command of French and her strong accent often elicited unkind comments in the streets or shops of Paris. I had to translate for her (she grew up very poor and never went to school) and felt a lot of shame, even as I hated myself for feeling that way. Paradoxically, I became angry whenever teachers refused to acknowledge my Spanish origins. I was already confused.

I always loved languages and studied Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as German, Russian and Italian. I also wanted to learn English, but all throughout my years at school something always prevented that from happening. I call that something Fate. I’ve now forgotten most of my German and Russian, even though being able to read Cyrillic proved very useful when we moved to Serbia.

I also played a lot of piano.

And I read, read, read – everything I could lay my hands on. There were no books in my home, but when I turned 9, I discovered our local library in Paris and began checking out 5 books each week. I loved Enyd Blyton and Alexandre Dumas. I also loved Nancy Drew – Alice Roy in France. It took me years to figure out that the books I’d loved so much were the Nancy Drew novels.

Eventually, I went to London to learn English, working as an au-pair and then as a nanny.  Best way to learn a language. I picked up vocabulary with the 2-year-old I was looking after and belted out Mary Poppins’ songs before I could form entire sentences. Two years later, having saved enough money, I traveled to the USA.

Being in the U.S. was like being in a movie. Nowadays, we can have anything delivered to our doorstep anywhere in the world, but at the time, the concept was uniquely American. I couldn’t stop laughing the first time I ordered pizza over the phone. It felt so incredibly cool. Getting food sitting in a car, talking to a machine! Beyond wild. I went to Florida, then to Central America, to Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, and back up to California, all by bus. I visited the Grand Canyon and slept in a teepee (or rather, I spent a sleepless, freezing night in a teepee). I went to the Desert Valley and ran in the sandy dunes, my steps echoing in the night, the sky above my head filled with stars. I lived in West Hollywood (and ended up working at the Cannes Film Festival with the only TV crew covering the festival in English at the time), traveled to San Francisco, and ended my trip in New York City. One night, I was walking in Manhattan, looking at all the lights, the skyscrapers, the yellow cabs. I felt the energy around me and thought: one day, I shall return and live here for a while. But money was gone, and I had to return to France. I now spoke English and got a job as a translator of novels. It was perfect. I got to read. I got to use my English. And I got to write.

Four years later, I fulfilled my wish to return to New York. It is where I met my husband. He’s from Haiti and works for UNICEF. After the birth of our first daughter, his job took us to Nigeria. Our daughter turned 7 months on the day we landed in Lagos. Our umbrella bed had been stolen at the airport in New York and she spent her first night in a drawer that we’d turned into a bed. See her below, waking up the following morning. She’d started to crawl and until we were able to get her a new bed, a month later, we’d find her all over the room in the morning.

I had traveled a lot, but Nigeria was something else. We lived in Enugu, the capital of the short-lived Biafra Republic in Igbo land. There wasn’t much to do. Only one really bad Chinese restaurant. No movie theaters. Constant power cuts. The phone and the Internet only worked sporadically and supplies were scarce. Once, we had no flour for almost two months. Another time, the whole town was without electricity for several weeks. But our daughter loved it. She ran after red-headed lizards just like Amadi in Amadi’s Snowman.

We had magnificent flamboyant and mango trees in our compound, and a cashew nut tree right outside our door. During the mango season, the trees were so heavy with fruits that we gave bags of them away. The cashew nut tree also gave a sweet, almost coy smell that floated around and inside the house. We had to be careful, as the fresh nut is poisonous. Once a week, I went to the market to buy fruits and vegetables and it looked and sounded exactly like the market where Amadi discovers the book: lots of noise, lots of people, lots of colors. Lots of garbage, too, unfortunately.

After a little over three years, we moved to Hyderabad, India. In between, I gave birth to our second little girl.

India was… incredible! as advertised in the famous tourism campaign. Nothing can prepare you for the shock of landing in India. Nor can anyone imagine what it is to live there. Often, as I drove around the streets of Hyderabad (the only expat at the time who didn’t have a driver), I laughed alone in the car, my heart bubbling with happiness. Colors, sounds, scents, rituals, people, people, people, everywhere, all of the time. It was magic. We spent six years in India, and I still miss it every day.

After India, we moved to Bangladesh, which shares a border with India. Our first year there was difficult. There is one saying: “When you arrive in Bangladesh, you cry. And when you leave Bangladesh forever, you cry, too.” Dhaka is a noisy city, one of the most densely populated in the world; it is chaotic, dirty, exhausting. But as soon as you leave the capital, everything changes. Water everywhere. The countryside is lush and green. People are kind and generous.

After three years (nine in the subcontinent), time had come to move again, and we landed in Serbia.

For the first time in 13 years, I had to face winter – short, dark days that made me want to roll up and hibernate. But Serbia is a land of mountains and beautiful scenery with a long, interesting and complex history. Italy, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Hungary, Austria, and even France were an easy drive away. And it is where I started dancing the Tango, which has since become a passion. We loved our time in Serbia.

Five years later, we relocated to Madagascar, with only one of our daughters, as the older one is now a young adult living her life in France. It was very strange to move to a new house and a new country without her. Our three years in Madagascar were sadly shadowed by the Covid Pandemic, and we were unable to cover as much ground as we usually do, even though we did travel as much as we could and ours minds are forever filled with images of gorgeous, unspoiled nature and the warm kindness of the Malagasy people.

We have now moved to the south of France where we spent several months renovating our house with our little hands and sore muscles (and making a ton of mistakes, but it was an interesting learning experience and ultimately satisfying, too.) Now that I no longer walk into tools and construction materials in every room, I have returned to the things that make me happiest : writing, reading, playing the piano, and dancing the tango (with some traveling, too, because you can never keep a wandering soul in one place for too long).