Catriona Kelly

I was born and brought up in London; in 1967, my parents bought a cottage in the West of Ireland, and we spent summers (and often also Easter holidays) there until I was in my mid-teens. I think that this made me adaptable, and enthusiastic about moving around. I developed an interest in Russia very early (inspired by War and Peace, which we listened to as a family on the radio when I was about 8 years old). As soon as I heard Russian was taught at my school, I decided I was going to learn it. Thanks to our wonderful teacher, Mrs Tatiana Knupffer, a graduate of the Kharkov Institute for Daughters of the Nobility in Exile (she was brought up in Serbia, though born in Moscow), and to the Russian relations of my friend, Melanie Anstey, I got a grounding in Russian that meant I could already speak and write it reasonably well when I reached Oxford. Between school and university, I spent six months living and working in Vienna, and I also had a year at the State University of Voronezh when I was doing modern languages at Oxford. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which made the country far more accessible,I have visited often, and in 2005, I bought a flat in St Petersburg. My experiences as a part-time St Petersburger are part of the material that I draw on in St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past. This is in some ways the most personal book that I've written, although it is mainly the story of how Russians see and understand the city, particularly those living there, and how their views of the city past have shaped their relationship with the place they live in.

You can find an interview about my St Petersburg project, including travel tips, here: http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2014/02/18/st-petersburg-shadows-of-the-past-interview-catriona-kelly/. George Miller's interview with me can be found on the popularity.com site. There is a public Facebook page on https://www.facebook.com/petersburgshadows, and my associated book project, Remembering St Petersburg, is on academia.edu.