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Johanna van Zanten was born in the Netherlands in 1949 and immigrated to Canada in 1982, and has been residing in Kelowna B.C since 1995. She acquired technical skills while writing court reports on the job for many years as a child protection social worker. She wrote her first short stories in her late fifties, discovered her love of writing and continued writing fictional stories in retirement.
She attended UBS online EdX and completed in-class intensive summer courses at UBC to boost her skills in the craft, and continued to participate in writer’s conferences and workshops.
Some of her stories made the shortlist in Glimmer Train, CBC/UBC Short Story Contest with the story Fort Good Hope, and long-listed in others (CBC short story competition), and more recently, she was the winner of the first Wine Country Writers’ Festival story contest – nonfiction 2021 with the story Prejudice and Necrotizing Enterocolitis. A few stories were published in anthologies (Maple Tree Literary Supplement; Sage-ing—a magazine for aging with grace, WCWF.)
Zanten self-published two books, the first one, a collection of interrelated fictionalized stories about her life and that of her friends: On Thin Ice (2012).
The second novel was a fictional story about a family adopting two older children, Guardians’ Betrayal (2017), suitable for YA.
Histria Books of Las Vegas released her next novel in 2021 in hardcover, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, historcial fiction, based on true events in the lives of her parents during the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. This also came out in paperback on August 1, 2023.
Her next novel is planned for release in 2024, The Imposter, also historical fiction, based on true events in the life of her grandmother from east-German/Slavic descent.
[BCBW 2024]
She attended UBS online EdX and completed in-class intensive summer courses at UBC to boost her skills in the craft, and continued to participate in writer’s conferences and workshops.
Some of her stories made the shortlist in Glimmer Train, CBC/UBC Short Story Contest with the story Fort Good Hope, and long-listed in others (CBC short story competition), and more recently, she was the winner of the first Wine Country Writers’ Festival story contest – nonfiction 2021 with the story Prejudice and Necrotizing Enterocolitis. A few stories were published in anthologies (Maple Tree Literary Supplement; Sage-ing—a magazine for aging with grace, WCWF.)
Zanten self-published two books, the first one, a collection of interrelated fictionalized stories about her life and that of her friends: On Thin Ice (2012).
The second novel was a fictional story about a family adopting two older children, Guardians’ Betrayal (2017), suitable for YA.
Histria Books of Las Vegas released her next novel in 2021 in hardcover, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, historcial fiction, based on true events in the lives of her parents during the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. This also came out in paperback on August 1, 2023.
Her next novel is planned for release in 2024, The Imposter, also historical fiction, based on true events in the life of her grandmother from east-German/Slavic descent.
[BCBW 2024]
