Maria Dziedzan

Maria draws on oral histories, part of her life since childhood, but she has also read widely on the actions of those twin devils, Stalin and Hitler. She writes about the tragedy of lives distorted by the totalitarian state of the USSR and of paths interrupted by war. Born and brought up in England, by a Ukrainian father and a Welsh mother, Maria Dziedzan’s family home was imbued with Ukrainian culture. An avid reader, Maria wrote her own stories in English from an early age. In recent years, with Ukraine once again making headline news, Maria has explored the history of this proud and much troubled country, and this informs the setting and family complications described in these moving stories. After several decades teaching teenagers about the power of words, and sharing her love of literature with them, she left her role as Head of English in a large comprehensive school to write full-time. When Sorrows Come is the debut novel in her My Lost Country series. It won The Big Bingham Book Read 2015 and was one of four finalists for the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016. Some of the characters from When Sorrows Come reappear in her second novel, Driven Into Exile, which tells us of the fate of a young woman taken by the Nazis as a slave labourer. Maria's most recent novel, Bread and Salt, continues Natalya's story into the 1950's and covers some of the horrors of Soviet life at that time. All three novels are available for your enjoyment in both paperback and for Kindle.