Olen Steinhauer writes:
I decided to become a writer at 19, and immediately wrote a play that will never be produced or published or seen by any eyes. When I was 21, I wrote a novel which will share the same fate. At 26 I wrote a second novel over a summer off from creative writing grad school. At best, it was just another exercise, though I though of it differently at the time.
Then, for my grad school thesis, I wrote the first third of my "now I'm serious" novel that took, on and off, three years to write, culminating in a Fulbright year in Romania to complete the research and the writing of it. While it will also never be seen, it was good enough, when I was 30, to get me an agent, but my agent was more interested in the crime novel I was writing at that time. The crime novel was taken by him that year, and sold the next.
So, from deciding to become a writer to getting my first book published, 12 years (riddled with numerous short stories and poems and lousy jobs) elapsed.
Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia and now lives in Hungary. He is the author of an acclaimed series of books chronicling Cold War Eastern Europe, the most recent of which, 36 Yalta Boulevard, will be released in June.
