 Karen
Mercury knew she wanted to be a writer while sitting on her
bed in Lucas Valley, California, at the age of 4, gazing at
The
Bee
Man of Orn. She thought, what power there is in creating imaginary
worlds! The reader is automatically transported into a reality
that you created. He hears your characters talking; he sees
the vistas you painted with words.
Then she realized she had
best teach herself to read, so she could understand what
was in the book she held.
When Karen was 12, she had a dream of being in a village
on the coast of Kenya, so at 23 she bought a one-way plane
ticket to Nairobi to find the village. She climbed the Mountains
of the Moon in Rwanda, hitchhiked overland through Uganda,
Zaire, and Zambia, lived with the Turkana in the Northern
Frontier District of Kenya, went down the Congo on a decrepit
steamer, and went up the Nile on a leaky dhow.
Her obsession with precolonial African history comes from
decades poring over the writings of explorers Burton, Stanley,
Livingstone, Grant, Baker, and Brazza. Victorian Africa was
an era when the most outlandish things were possible, and
did indeed happen. It was a time of grand gestures, acts of
heroism, dramatic scenes of violence, and above all the endurance,
valor and passion that drove the scientists, missionaries,
and traders who were drawn to Africa.
Karen lives in Northern California with her husband and her
bronze Newfoundland.
Web Site: www.karenmercury.com.
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