/ Natasha Mostert

Natasha Mostert

Natasha Mostert is a South African-born author with five published novels behind her name. Even though she only started to consider herself an author after she had signed the contract with her publisher, she's considered herself a writer for a much longer time. 'Even during the time I worked as a university teacher, writing esoteric, dry-as-dust academic articles, I knew that some day I would like to write creatively.'

Mostert has been fascinated with the paranormal from a young age. 'I grew up in South Africa and had a nanny who was training to be a witch doctor. I always had the feeling when I spoke to her that there was something hovering on the edge of my peripheral vision, and if I could turn my head fast enough then maybe I could catch it.'

Mostert's first book, The Midnight Side, was published in 2000, and tells a story of obsessive love and a ghost manipulating the London Stock Exchange. This book was followed by The Other Side of Silence in 2001, in which a sinister computer game becomes the key to unravelling the riddle of the Pythagorean Comma: one the oldest and deadliest mysteries in the science of sound.

Her third novel, Windwalker, is a story of fratricide, redemption, ghost photography and soul mates searching for each other, while her fourth creation, Season of the Witch, is a modern gothic thriller about techgnosis and the Art of Memory. Season of the Witch won the Book to Talk About World Book Day 2009 Award.

The Keeper (also published as Keeper of Light and Dust) is Mostert's latest novel. In this novel, Mostert joins together ancient mysteries with cutting-edge science and introduces a fascinating heroine who belongs to a long line of Keepers: women who are healers, warriors and protectors of men who are engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Tattoos, quantum physics, chi and martial arts all combine in an intricately crafted plot.

Biographical details

Natasha Mostert was born in South Africa, and grew up in Pretoria and Johannesburg. She was educated in South Africa and at Columbia University, New York, and holds graduate degrees in Lexicography and Applied Linguistics as well as a bachelor's in Modern Languages, majoring in Afrikaans, Dutch, English and German.

She worked as a teacher in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, ans as a project coordinator in the publishing department of public television station WNET/Thirteen in New York City.

Aside from writing, her interests include music, running and kickboxing. Her future goals include writing poetry, executing a perfect spinning backkick and coming face to face with a ghost. Mostert is a full-time writer who currently lives in London with her husband, Frederick. She still keeps an apartment in the university town Stellenbosch, South Africa.