Lisa Cooper

Lisa Cooper was born in 1969 in Norwich, England. She studied Russian at Edinburgh University, attracted by a passion for languages and a fascination with the country's people and history. As a student, she spent a year in the southern Russian city of Voronezh. Armed with nothing more than an old address dating from the 1960s and a family tree, she managed to make contact with cousins in Kiev, who introduced her to a web of relatives she knew nothing about. The experience helped breed an interest in both family history and Ukrainian history. A Forgotten Land was originally conceived as a dissertation for a Masters degree in History at University College London, and is based on a series of recordings made by her father in the 1980s of his mother -- Pearl -- talking in Yiddish about her early life in Ukraine. Sidetracked by the fascinating story her grandmother's tapes revealed, she abandoned the degree and set about turning her work into a novel based on her own family's lives and experiences. She lives in Cornwall, south-west England, with her husband and two young children, and works as a journalist. This is her first book.