About

WRITING BECAUSE THERE IS NO OTHER WAY

Sacha Wamsteker was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands. After high school, instead of enrolling at a university like most of her classmates, she headed to the USA for what was supposed to be a year abroad. Los Angeles infected her with the Hollywood bug, and she ended up being a resident of the city for four years, only to discover that she was a writer, rather than an actress. When, to her own surprise, some of her poetry was published, she started wondering whether her work might be more than a mere outlet for the intense experiences the movie capital bombarded her with. The city kicked her around like a boxer in a fighting rink, but she liked it and wrote it down.

When her permit expired she had to leave against her will, but the seed of English as a creative language had been watered and nourished by that modern-day Babylon. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam to expose herself to as much prose and poetry as she could. After receiving her master’s degree with honors, she went on to add a master in Journalism.

This last degree landed her a job at Trouw, a Dutch national paper, where she worked as a reporter covering national and international news. Subsequently, she became a freelance journalist, writing articles for Dutch newspapers and magazines.

After some time, in addition to poetry, Wamsteker began writing fiction.

When she finally mustered the courage to begin writing a novel, it turned into a coming of age story titled LA Diary or the Dark Side of the Sun.

At the moment she is working on a second novel that wants to be a trilogy.

Her work featured in several different literary magazines, among which Babel in the Netherlands, and The Stray Branch, The Santa Barbara Literary Journal and Last Girls Club in the United States.

In December 2020, Delirium Corridor, an anthology of dark fiction inspired by Black Mirror, David Lynch and The Twilight Zone, was released by Borda Books, containing Offline, one of her short stories. In July 2024, the anthology Vinyl Cuts was released, containing Wamsteker’s I Put a Spell on You.

Her blog has proven to be a place for mourning. In 2014, during a year Wamsteker lived on the island of Ibiza with her husband and two children, her father died unexpectedly. The blogs were a way to deal with the grief.

On the last day of 2019, December 31^st , Niels, her love, husband and father of their two daughters died just as unexpectedly as her father had. It was the day she learned an entire new kind of blackness. Trying to get to grips with the reality of having lost him, she writes the blogs for Niels’ family and her own, his many friends, his children and herself.

The closing sequel of the loss-trilogy came in the shape of the Los Angeles wildfires. Finally having relocated to her beloved city in August 2024, the choice of neighborhood turned out to be a disastrous one. Wamsteker adored her new habitat, Pacific Palisades, and thoroughly enjoyed its verdurous small town atmosphere. But it was a short-lived pleasure. On January 7th wildfires started in the mountains above the village that would wipe the entirety of Pacific Palisades off the map, like the town of Centralia in Pennsylvania. Homeless with two teenagers and a Savannah cat, she retreated to Ibiza, the Spanish island that had offered her family refuge several times before.

Wamsteker’s work is available at:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0CXDYR2W2

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