K. S. Kalev is an Estonian-born author residing in rural Devon, where she landed after years of running amok in London. She writes character driven literary fiction with elements of magical realism, and she enjoys exploring the strange, the obscure and the quintessentially human.

After a long hiatus, K. S. Kalev has just finished writing her first novel and is busy plotting the next while taking short breaks to write short stories.

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Born in Estonia at the tail end of the soviet occupation, K. S. grew up in a brave new world birthed by the restoration of the country’s independence. The energy, the optimism and the hunger for progress that defined her youth, stood in sharp contrast to the stories told by her parents, grandparents and history teachers about life behind the Iron Curtain. Some were heartbreaking, others infuriating while many were amusing and spoke of the resilience of her people. At school she wrote children’s stories and while at university, she contributed to journals and magazines.

In 2007, shortly after graduating with a degree in Critical Art Theory, she moved from Tallinn to London, thinking: ‘Why not!’. The big city offered buckets of joy and wild adventures, introduced her to colourful people and outrageous characters, and to balance things out, presented many painful disappointments.

Now, nearly two decades later, living in an old, secluded farmhouse in Devon, she is harnessing all that she has seen and experienced, heard and thought about, in her writing. 

Offering a unique viewpoint as a post-soviet alien in pre- and post-Brexit Britain, she explores themes like identity, nostalgia and belonging, while weaving contemporary history, cultural shifts and the spirit of the 21st Century London into her stories.

While her own varied life has heavily influenced her personal philosophy and provided inspiration in plenitude, her goal is to never pigeonhole her characters, drawing instead on the universal human experience, transcendent of arbitrary borders and man-made walls.