About
Karuna Kotak, author of The EDEN Trials: Guidance, has a penchant for meaningful storytelling. On a quest to encourage readers, writers, and artists to courageously embark on their own adventures, she combines diverse perspectives with historical elements, scientific musings, and cultural flavors to create worlds rich with possibility. Drawing inspiration from her Indian heritage and childhood in South Asia as well as her American roots, she is inspired by the pioneering inventors and engineers who’ve gone before her.
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Karuna received a Texas state PTA Award of Excellence in literature for her essay, “Embracing Imperfection,” and she’s created a guide through grief for children, inspired by her experience after her father’s death. She’s currently charting her course to pursue her dream of flying as an airline pilot and working on her next novel.
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Since I was very young, I found solace through my writing. My first taste of the written word was through bedtime stories, like C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, or Andrew Peterson’s The Wingfeather Saga. To this day—over a decade, now—I continue to lose myself in the perfection of the worlds I’ve created, from distinct cultures to complex plot lines to all my lovingly developed characters.
My joy for writing and reading travelled with me to India, where my dad grew up, many times over the first seven years of my life, and each year, I delighted in my ever growing fantasies. The dreamworld that I was creating expanded with the new culture I encountered, until it became a seamless blend of my American and Indian heritage and everything in between.
My mom, my brother, and I returned from India when I turned eight years old after my father's mental health disorder took a turn for the worse. Several years after, my father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. During this period of unsettled change, I looked to my art and writing for comfort and guidance. Through middle school, I had a phenomenal English teacher who actively encouraged my love for writing, and she has continued to support me since. After a bet with a boy in that class, I resolved to publish a book one day, and finish a novel before the end of the school year.
While I did write a book, and for a sixth grader, it wasn't bad, it was still simply the many musings of a child that didn't understand plot-structure. (Even now, I wouldn't call myself an expert on the subject, but my many story-boards and I have created a system that works pretty well.) When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into lockdown, myself and two other friends joined forces to write our own trilogy over Zoom. Similarly to my first attempt, this one also lacked much, but it laid the foundation for the story I've created today, and nurtured the love for storytelling that fuels my creativity.
Now, my stories are tales of grief, healing, and learning how to live in a world that is ever-changing, forever influenced by countless past journals kept full of laments, jubilation, and the monotony in between.
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These days, I find myself creating art for my current world-in-progress, Arakrona, from The EDEN Trials, and story-boarding new potential ideas to write in the future. Like Sephie, the young artist-engineer from my first novel, Guidance, I dream of flight and living free in the sky. In addition to writing more books, I'll continue my own quest of becoming an airline pilot.
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For each period of my life, especially during the hardest ones, I can think of a book with a character that I deeply relate to. It's comforting, in a way, to know that even though these people are often fictional, they share my own experience. I hope that you, too, can find pieces of yourself in my work, and they can bring you peace the same way so many other authors did for me.