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Brigid Pasulka biography

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Brigid Pasulka
Photo Credit: Matthew Gilson

Brigid Pasulka

How to pronounce Brigid Pasulka: Pa –soolk –ah

Brigid Pasulka Biography

Brigid Pasulka was born and raised in rural Illinois and has lived in Poland, Russia, Germany and Italy.

Her debut novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

Her second novel, The Sun and Other Stars, was an Indie Next pick for February 2014.

Brigid lives in Chicago with her husband and son and runs the writing center at a public high school.

Brigid Pasulka's website

This bio was last updated on 07/28/2014. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Interview

Brigid Pasulka explains why she wrote her first novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, which is set in Poland during World War II and in Kraków 50 years later.

In the Spring of 1994, I ignored every practical impulse and decided to spend the year after college living somewhere abroad.  I did a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course in Hastings, in the South of England, that summer and afterwards spent a week at a bonsai nursery in East Grinstead with two of my coursemates, sorting through my vast options.  Somehow I ended up alone on a train platform in Krakow with a pile of luggage, no job, no place to stay, no contacts and about ten words of Polish.  I decided to stay the year.  Incredibly, that year turned out to be all I'd hoped for—liberating, gut-wrenching and mystical, set against the primordial dawn of capitalism in Eastern Europe and the waning dusk of the pre-Internet world.  Every lost Gen-X kid's fantasy.

I returned to Chicago and couldn't stop telling stories about Krakow.  When I sensed my family and friends were growing weary of me, I began to inflict my stories on my computer.  I had never written any fiction outside of class assignments.  I certainly did not set out to write a novel.  I only meant to make a list of the things I didn't want to forget about that year in Krakow.&...

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Books by this Author

Books by Brigid Pasulka at BookBrowse
The Sun and Other Stars jacket A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True jacket
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