Christine Leunens

Christine Leunens (born 29 December 1964) is a New Zealand-Belgian novelist. She is the author of Primordial Soup, A Can of Sunshine, and In Amber's Wake, which have been translated into twenty-five languages. She is best known for her historical novel Caging Skies, which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Jojo Rabbit.

Early life and education

Leunens was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to an Italian mother and a Belgian father. She received her undergraduate degree in French Literature from the University of North Carolina. At the age of nineteen, Leunens moved to Montpellier for a year of study. She supported her studies and early writing career as a print model in France, posing for fashion designers Givenchy, Pierre Balmain, Paco Rabanne, Sonia Rykiel, Nina Ricci, magazines Vogue and Marie Claire, and appearing in television advertisements such as Mercedes-Benz.

In 1990, she spent a year breeding horses on a farm in Picardy during which time she began to write. In 1996, she received the award for Best Original Screenplay from the Centre National du Cinéma. The following year, she attended a summer session studying English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford, which prompted her to write her first novel Primordial Soup.

Leunens received a Master of Liberal Arts in English and American Literature from the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2005. She received the Thomas Small Prize for Academic Achievement and Character and her thesis on Henry James and The Ambassadors received the Dean’s Thesis Prize in the Humanities.

In 2008, Leunens was granted a scholarship from Victoria University of Wellington for a PhD in Creative Writing, and became the second recipient of a PhD at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her doctoral study, focusing on the portrayal of the mother-in-law figure in English literature, served as inspiration for her novel A Can of Sunshine.

In 2017, Caging Skies was adapted into a play, which premiered at the Circa Theatre in Wellington. Film director Taika Waititi adapted the novel into the film Jojo Rabbit, which was nominated for six Academy Awards in 2019, winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2020. Leunens and Waititi were nominated together for the USC Libraries Scripter Award 2020 that “honors both the author and the screenwriter” and received AFI awards for their “contribution to America’s Cultural Legacy”. The novel was selected by the New Zealand Herald as amongst the best books in English worldwide in 2013.

In 2023 Leunens was awarded a UNESCO-Prague City of Literature Writer-in-Residence to work on her fifth novel.

Personal life Leunens married in 1999 and she and her husband have three children together.

Novels

Primordial Soup (1999) Caging Skies (2008) A Can of Sunshine (2013) In Amber's Wake (2022)