Background
Katsu was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, the daughter of an American-born father and a Japanese-born mother, she spent the majority of her youth living near Concord, Massachusetts, which she attributes to her interest in the early American history featured in her novels.
Education
She attended Brandeis University (Bachelor in literature and writing, 1981) where she studied with novelist John Irving and children's book author Margaret Rey, and the Johns Hopkins University (Master of Arts in Fiction, 2004).
Career
Her best-known work is The Taker, a literary novel with historical and fantasy elements that was published in 2011 and recognized as one of the ten best debut novels of the year by the American Library Association. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain and Italy. She has also had a 29-year career in the United States federal government working in a number of positions dealing with intelligence and foreign policy, with an emphasis on technology issues.
Since 2012 she has worked as a senior policy analyst for the Research and Development Corporation.
She is also an alumnus of the Squaw Valley writers workshops. Katsu’s novels are generally cited for the quality of the prose and the ability to portrait a supernatural setting in an immediate and realistic way (“makes the supernatural seem possible” – Publishers Weekly and "renews a genre tragedy withoutthe hyperbole of high romance"—Locus Magazine).
The first novel in the trilogy, The Taker, is set primarily in the past but has a present day narrative as a frame,
Viewed as another literary take on the Faustian bargain and a model of setting stories-within-stories, The Taker Trilogy tells the story of a young woman who has been given eternal life but comes to see this condition as a punishment for evil acts she perpetrated in life and is now condemned to revisit until the end of time.