Ana Dean (pseudonym) is an Australian author who grew up the youngest of three girls in a Croatian migrant household in the Melbourne suburb of Altona North.

 

Ana’s parents encouraged her involvement in their local Croatian-Australian community and nurtured her curiosity about the family’s history and politically troubled heritage.

 

As a result of that early exposure to the struggles faced by this migrant group, both in their country of origin and in their country of refuge, Ana cultivated longstanding interests in history, sociology, immigration, justice and politics.

 

Ana has lived in South Australia and Melbourne and has travelled extensively throughout North America and Europe. She has an extensive collection of crucifixes (her little obsession), many of which are souvenirs from various places around the world that she’s visited.

 

Today Ana lives with her husband and a feral cat called Pus; a sweet, but sassy feline who adopted herself into their family four years ago.

 

She loves a good meal and a yarn with family and friends and spends her spare time reading, walking, researching family histories and exploring family trees.

 

Ana hadn’t always planned on becoming an author, even though writing was always her best friend. When her sister ran away, Ana was just a teenager. It was the ‘80s and no one; not the police, nor the system, nor her parents, nor she knew how to cope. As a fifteen-year-old girl, she turned to her journals for comfort and as a means of sorting through her thoughts, theories, fears and sometimes just dates, times and mundane facts, on the chance that something she’d documented might later prove to be a clue as to how she could get her sister back.

 

Twenty-five years later, these journals formed the basis for a book that she felt compelled to write, both to expose the truth of her sister’s story and to help others who might benefit from reading it. She has changed the names of people and published under a pseudonym in order to protect her family.

                                                                                             

Having now published her book and recently graduated from a university with a Diploma in Languages, Ana is proud to say that she has ticked the last two remaining items off her bucket list.

 

She is now looking forward to starting her own interpretation services business in the near future and doing as much travel as she can, as often as she can, especially to her beloved Croatia.