Gina Ochsner is shortlisted for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction
Gina Ochsner
Gina Ochsner is one of five finalists shortlisted for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, an Oregon Book Award for her novel, The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight which was published in March 2009.
Ochsner already has won An Oregon Book Awards for her collection of short stories People I Wanted to Be.
The new novel, her first, started as a dare. As she told the Oregon Statesman Journal : 'Somebody said, you cannot write magical realism and make it last for the life of a novel ... Most stories I have written started this way.'
She started taking notes on her first trip to Russia in 1993, she said, and continued with trips in 2002 and 2006. Writing the novel was 'an off-and-on love affair,' she said, with about four to five years of active work. Gina has written about her full on love affair with Russia on her blog.
Besides writing, she teaches for the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program and Corban College and Graduate School; works part-time at Withnell Auto (her father is Dick Withnell); and, with husband Brian, raises four children from 8 to 20 years old.
'I think in small spaces and work in seven minutes waiting in the mommy lineup outside school,' she said. "A Post-It note, that might be my output for the day.'
Related Works
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The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (First Hardback Edition)
‘Nothing stays dead in Russia.’ This bewitching novel of post-Soviet lives moves between the magical, the comical and the transcendent to portray a people who rely on dreams to defy the coming of dereliction and decay.
Published: 01/03/09, RRP: £15.99, Introductory Offer: 20% Off All Titles, Web Price: £12.79, You Save: £3.20 (20%), ADD TO BASKET
Related Contributors
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Gina Ochsner
Born in 1970, Gina Ochsner has worked as a dog-walker, a substitute teacher, and in a shop selling cheese and puppets, and now lives in western Oregon with her husband and four children.
