The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine

Katherine Marsh is an American author. She has published six middle grade novels including, The Twilight Prisoner; The Night Tourist; Jepp, Who Defied Stars; The Door by the Staircase; Nowhere Boy; and most recently, The Lost Year. Marsh grew up in New York and studied English at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. After teaching English for a year, she turned to a career in journalism, writing and editing for publications including Good Housekeeping, Rolling Stone, The Washington City Paper, and The New Republic. She concluded her work in journalism following her grandmother’s death in 2001, at which time she began writing children’s books in order to process her loss and grief. Her novels have since won an array of awards, including the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, the Jane Addams Award for Children’s Chapter Books, and the Middle East Book Award.

Originally published in 2023 by Macmillan, Marsh’s novel The Lost Year is based upon her own family’s history. Marsh grew up with her Ukrainian grandmother, Natalia Stepanivna Ostapiuk, or Natasha, throughout the 1980s. Like Mila, Natasha had a unique opportunity: “[T]o leave the Soviet Union and come to America when she did was a rare feat” (341). In her Author’s Note, Marsh reiterates that the characters in The Lost Year are fictional, but that her grandmother’s and her great-aunt’s experiences in Ukraine in the 1930s inspired Mila, Helen, and Nadiya’s accounts.