Katerli Nina

   Writer.
   Nina Katerli was born on June 30, 1934 in Leningrad in a family of journalists. Her mother, Yelena Iosifovna Katerli, was a well-known fiction writer. The last name Katerli has Polish roots. Nina Katerli’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Katerli, comes from a small aristocratic family in Poland, which had received Russian citizenship after the unification of Russia and Poland in 700’s. Her father, Semyon Samojlovich Farfel, was a journalist and a member of the Russian Writers Union. He was a son of a famous reporter, who had written for the “Rech” newspaper in pre-Revolutionary Russia. In 1958 Nina Katerli has graduated from the Leningrad Technological Institute, and for 15 years she has worked as a chemical engineer. She began to write at the end of the 1960s. Her first publication, a short story “Welcome”, was published in “Kostyor” magazine in 1973. Since then she has written many stories and novels which came out in various periodicals and publishing houses. Many of them were translated into different languages. Besides her literary work, she is an ardent civil rights activist, who has published articles on the topics of human rights, anti-racist movement in Russia, and the situation of the elderly in Russia. Nina Karterli is member of St. Petersburg Writers’ Union and St. Petersburg PEN Club. She also serves on the editorial boards of “International Words”, “Reading Russia”, “Barrier”, and “Literate News” magazines. “To live and work according to one’s consciousness” is the creative credo and position of Nina Karterli. She can be contacted at: nina@katerli.spb.su

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