I still remember the feel of opening a new book, that promise of getting lost between the pages of a story.

I started to write when I was seven or eight, but it took a long time before I admitted to myself that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Between then and now I’ve worked various jobs, most of them content-related, read tonnes of books and wrote stories.

But writing stories isn’t always easy, sometimes it even feels that the more you learn, the harder it gets. Let’s be honest, stories can be stubborn and won’t always allow us to whip them into the desired shape. Our characters will misbehave, sabotage our plans, or storm off willy-nilly and boycott cooperation altogether.

These things happen even to people with a lot of experience, because what matters in the end is the story, not the writer.

In almost forty years of writing fiction, I’ve learned how to listen to the story and give it its best possible shape. 

I publish fiction as Karmen Špiljak and my non-fiction as Karmen H. Špiljak. My short story collection, ‘Add Cyanide to Taste’, won the 2022 IndieReader Discovery Award for short stories and my thriller, ‘No Such Thing as Goodbye’, has been shortlisted and received an honourable mention on The Black Spring Crime Fiction Prize 2020.

If you’re passionate about storytelling and want to improve your craft, if you see storytelling as a process rather than a check-list or if you’re just curious, you came to the right place.