Katja Willemsen (South Africa)
Katja Willemsen grew up in South Africa and now writes full time in the hamlet of Oms, France. The Manon Maury Mystery series is born of her love for the Pyrenees, local food, French village life and the Catalan people – an earthy, stubborn, wise bunch whose culture embraces the sacred and mystical. Her first book, the biography An Elephant in my Kitchen, was published in 2019 in the UK and US (Macmillan), France (Tredaniel) and Germany (mvg Verlag). It describes how a French woman took over a South African game reserve after the death of her husband. Katja is currently working on Book 2 in the Manon Maury series: The Black Madonna.