Anika Pavel On The 5 Things You Need to Know to Become a Great Author

Read as much as you can. For my fifteenth birthday I received a book by Irvin Stone, entitled “Lust for Life”. It is a biography about Vincent van Gogh. But the book was much more than that, it’s a story of struggle, determination and love for the art Van Gogh felt he had to produce. It became my bible. Whenever I doubt myself, I read a few pages and I am cured.

As part of my interview series on the five things you need to know to become a great author, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anika Pavel. Born Jarmila Kocvarova in Czechoslovakia, her one year stay in England turned her into a refugee when the Soviet Union invaded her homeland, writing a bloody end to the Prague Spring. When her employer went to prison, she received a crash course in life that took her from sleeping in a telephone booth at the Victoria railway station (in London) to waitressing, to the lights of the fashion runway, magazines, TV, and movies under the more pronounceable moniker, Anika Pavel. In her book, Encounter with the Future, Anika Pavel shares her experience that took her across political divides and into…