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Karen van der Zee's Biography
As a child growing up in Holland, I always wanted to write. I was a dreamer, reading books and making up my own fanciful tales. I had notebooks full of stories which I illustrated with crayon drawings. My brothers burned the
notebooks in the attic one day, fortunately not burning down the house. They don't remember this now, but I do!
I also always wanted to travel. Holland is very flat and I wanted to see mountains! Tropical beaches with coconut palms! Deserts! Interesting people! And then I wanted to write adventurous love stories set in these exotic places.
I got lucky and fell in love with a globetrotting American. I met him in
Amsterdam, he asked me to marry him in Rome, and we tied the knot in a ten-minute ceremony in Kenya, East Africa, where he was a Peace Corps Volunteer. Some adventure!
After Kenya we lived in the States for a while, then four years in Ghana, West Africa where our first daughter was born as well as my first Mills & Boon romance. It took me a year to write. It was set in Ghana, and I called it SWEET NOT ALWAYS, a slogan found on a big colorfully decorated truck that
transported people, goods, and live chickens. My editor later told me that my manuscript was fished out of the slush pile, one out of a thousand that make it to publication. I wrote more romances and loved the creativity of it, although it was, and is, never easy. Later we also lived in Indonesia,
Ramallah (Palestine), then another three years in Ghana, and now Armenia, which lies east of Turkey and north of Iran. Along the way we acquired a couple more kids, so now we have three.
I've written over thirty books now, many set in exotic locations such as Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, Java, Kenya and Ghana, as well as Holland and the U.S. Writing as Mona van Wieren, I received a RITA for a Silhouette Romance entitled RHAPSODY IN BLOOM.
I love the challenge of living in a foreign country where the food is
different, the people interesting and life gives me endless romantic
inspiration for my writing. So, I'll just keep going for a while.
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