Meet Ksenija

If you’re a stickler for spelling (and if you’re curious enough to Google me), my name is Ksenija Popović. If you’d rather not puzzle over how to pronounce the J or whether the Ć is a K or a CH, you can go with Ksenia Popovich. And if you want to keep it simple, my friends call me Kse, and I love it.

I’m a novelist, playwright, essayist, and occasional screenwriter. I’ve also been a diplomat, TV presenter and producer, festival director, coach, and consultant. I run a small firm that brings together everything I do, with a particular love for cultural events and creative production.

I’m from Montenegro, raised in Italy, and I’ve lived in the United States, Spain, and France. I write in English not because it’s my native language, but because it lets me create conversations with more people from around the world.

Books have always helped me make sense of contradictions: internal, cultural, historical, and otherwise. I’ve written novels, essays, columns, plays, and the occasional blog post that turned out to matter more than I expected. My debut novel, The Boy From the Water (2004), made me the first female novelist in Montenegro.

My latest novel, Fathers Before Sons, is my first work written directly in English.

Outside of writing (and talking about writing), I'm a high-performance coach, avid photographer, and mixed media artist. My creative process relies on a genuine love for the depth and inconsistencies of the human experience.

This Side of the Map is where I write about what I notice: stories, people, roles, language, and the strange, human things we do when we think no one is watching.