Paullina Simons was born Paullina Handler in the Soviet Union where her fourth novel 'The Bronze Horseman' is set. She lived with her engineer mother and civil lawyer father and uncle and aunt and cousin in the two rooms in which her heroine Tatiana would live with her family. Her paternal grandfather lived through the first deadly winter of the siege of Leningrad before joining the Red Army in 1942.

In 1968, when she was five, her father was arrested for anti-Communist agitation during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This agitation included writing letters to the Pravda newspaper advocating the rule of law. He was jailed for a year, then sent to the GULAG for two. After he returned in 1971, he was exiled to Tolmachevo where he melted metal and moulded concrete for telephone poles.

However, his years in prison gave her father the time and the opportunity to do a life-changing thing. Yuri Handler learned English.

In 1973, he asked the Soviet government for permission to emigrate, and Leonid Brezhnev, in a period of détente with Nixon (and in a weak moment) agreed. After a short stay in Rome, they arrived in New York on Thanksgiving, 1973.

Because her father had learned English in his hour of greatest prescience, in America he was able to get a job far and above the menial labouring job that many Russian immigrants continue to get. Because of his English, he was able to afford a life among middle-class Americans and Paullina was able to go to school amid American children and learn English. Eventually they moved out of the city into the suburbs with a house, a yard, a pool and two cars in the driveway. All the things many Americans take for granted, Yuri Handler took as the realization of his grandest dream.

All Paullina wanted to be in her life besides a novelist was a successful American, but unsuccessful romantic endeavours at university led her to flee the North American continent and move to England in her senior year, right in the middle of the miners' strike in 1984. There she met husband number one and followed him to Lawrence, Kansas, for her senior senior year. Kansas made little impression on her at the time; ironic since it was Kansas that would serve as the setting for her first novel, 'Tully'.

After graduating with a degree in political science, Paullina followed husband number one back to England, where she found a job as a financial journalist and became pregnant - not necessarily in that order. Her daughter was born in 1987 and in 1988 she wrote the first two chapters of a book called 'Tully Makker'. But with a full-time job and a full-time family, that was all she wrote.

After four years, her unsuccessful spousal endeavours led her to flee England and return to the United States. She told her high school best friend that she was running out of continents. He responded by in due course becoming husband number two and keeping her in America.

In New York she was offered positions at a number of news agencies. She chose to accept a job as a writer for the 'Financial News Network'.

It was a fateful choice, if not the wisest.

Six weeks after her hiring, the company went into Chapter 13 bankruptcy - through no fault of Paullina's. She managed to hang on to a paycheck for ten more months, but the company was finally shut down.

Now on unemployment, she decided that destiny was indeed knocking on her door, and so she put her daughter into daycare three days a week, and wrote 'Tully'.

It took her two years to finish 'Tully', and on the afternoon in March 1993 as she was printing it out, ready to send to prospective agents, her employment recruiter called her telling her he had a job for her. She accepted the position in May, but in June sold 'Tully' and was able to quit her day job.

Her new (and improved) second husband and she built a house, she had her second child and wrote her second novel 'Red Leaves'.

Then destiny came knocking on the door once again. A headhunter in Dallas, Texas, called her husband and asked him if he would be interested in relocating to start up a publishing company for a small television studio. So they left their brand new house and their life in New York and moved to Texas during the blistering summer of 1996, when Paullina was seven months pregnant with her third child. She had just started writing her third book, set in Barrow, Alaska - one of the coldest places on earth. For some reason this book was hard to write in the 115°F heat of Dallas. The pregnancy in the heat made such an impression on her, that she suddenly became inspired in a different direction and, in a matter of a few short months, wrote 'Eleven Hours'.

It was in the middle of revisions on 'Eleven Hours', during one late sleepless night, in the dark, at three in the morning, with her infant in the bassinet at the foot of her bed, and her husband sleeping soundly, that Paullina saw them.

She saw Tatiana and Alexander. She was small, and he was tall. She was looking up at him. They were desperately in love, and they were starving.

Their story became 'The Bronze Horseman'.

But between the inspiration and the publication flew three years of building a house on the prairie and going to Russia. Three years of agony and uncertainty and fear over her book and over her future. Three years of changing publishers and changing agents and her husband's Texas job coming to an end, and leaving Texas and returning to New York. Oh, and of writing another book, while everyone waited for 'The Bronze Horseman'. The other book was 'Six Days in Leningrad', a non-fiction account of her life and her return to Russia in 1998.

But after finishing 'Six Days in Leningrad', the white heat came down upon her, and she descended into 1941, and forgot 1999, and forgot her house, and her pool and Texas and her woes. She forgot everything. And when she looked up from her computer, she had 'The Bronze Horseman', a prequel, two sequels and a screenplay, and the movers were coming.

Now back in New York, she is living in a cramped apartment, revising her Tatiana and Alexander manuscripts and thinking ahead to a book that won't have them in it. Since she likes to have one child for every book she publishes, she is also working on her fourth child. What happens when books five, six, and seven are published, she cannot hazard a guess. She will probably need a bigger apartment.