Leah Kaminsky

Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel, The Waiting Room, is followed by We’re all Going to Die. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist. She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

From Kaminsky's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Waiting Room, and for your main character, Dina?

A: The book has been with me for many years. In my 20s I wanted to write a book about my mother’s war experiences as a teenager in the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and finally, Bergen Belsen. She was the sole survivor of her entire family.

After she died I only remembered a handful of the stories she had told me and, sadly, there was no one left to ask.

It took me a long time to build on those snippets of my mother’s narrative via fiction. I wanted to create a character who, like me, had been a reluctant listener in her youth. She is named after Dina’s cat in Alice in Wonderland, who...[read on]

Visit Leah Kaminsky's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Waiting Room.

Writers Read: Leah Kaminsky (November 2016).

The Page 69 Test: The Waiting Room.

--Marshal Zeringue