Ruta Sepetys (Rūta Šepetys) is a New York Times–bestselling author of historical fiction. Winner of the Carnegie Medal for literature, Sepetys is renowned for giving voice to underrepresented histories, calling herself a "seeker of lost stories." Her books have won or been shortlisted for over forty book prizes, and several are currently in development for film and television.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Sepetys is the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee. She was raised in an artistic family, and earned a Bachelor of Science in International Finance from Hillsdale College. She also studied at the ICN Graduate Business School in Nancy, France, and the Centre d’études Européennes in Toulon, France. After graduation, she stared her own entertainment management firm in Los Angeles, where she became involved in music education.
During a trip to visit family in Lithuania in 2005, Sepetys learned about her family's traumatic history, including the deportation of several family members to Siberia. This revelation inspired Sepetys to write the historical fiction novel, Between Shades of Gray, which helped her connect with and process her family's history. After the success of this novel, Sepetys wrote several novels centering underrepresented histories, including Out of the Easy, Salt to the Sea, and Fountains of Silence.
Sepetys' novels have been published in over sixty countries and translated into dozens of languages. She has spoken before NATO, the European Parliament, and the U.S. Congress. For her work in "education and memory preservation," Sepetys received the "Cross of the Knight of the Order," an honor bestowed by the President of Lithuania; her image was also featured on a Lithuanian postage stamp celebrating the 100th anniversary of Lithuanian independence.
Sepetys earned the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Fellowship for her "studies on human resilience." The New York Times Book Review declared, “Ruta Sepetys acts as champion of the interstitial people so often ignored—whole populations lost in the cracks of history.”
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys tells the story of fifteen-year-old Lina whose family is deported from their home in Lithuania to a Siberian labor camp in 1941. As the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, Sepetys was inspired by her father to...
Ruth Sepetys' I Must Betray You is a historical thriller set in communist Romania during the late 1980s. The young-adult novel focuses on the "citizen spy network" that emerged during the fall of Soviet regimes, following seventeen-year-old...
Ruta Sepetys is an American author born on November 19, 1967 in Detroit, Michigan. Although Sepetys currently makes her living as a writer, she did not even pursue a humanities field in university. She received a degree in International Finance...
Salt to the Sea is a young-adult historical fiction novel published on February 2, 2016. It is Ruta Sepetys’s third novel. Like Sepetys’s other three novels, Salt to the Sea explores the lost and forgotten stories of history. In particular, it...
