Katya de Becerra wanted to be an Egyptologist when she grew up. Instead, she became a cultural anthropologist - not the type who goes away to faraway locales but the one who sticks to the urban and the familiar and attempts to view it through a stranger's lens. She immigrated to Australia in 2006, after having lived in Russia, USA and Peru, and now writes young adult fiction set in some peculiar place with a mercurial atmosphere where strange things go bump in the night.