I won my first writing award in second grade: “Author of Merit” in a kids’ short story contest in my Illinois hometown. I’d been chosen for my story about a princess, a topic assigned to me by my teacher very much against my will. Still, standing on that stage at our local community college, I knew exactly what I wanted to be.
Then I got sidetracked. I fell in love with cities, discovered my passion for community development, went to law school, and started a career. For decades, I worked happily on urban policy and neighborhood revitalization—first as a housing attorney, then as a non-profit leader. Finally, in 2017, I grabbed the chance to make a big change. After an inspirational couple weeks at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Program, I moved with my family to Leipzig, Germany (a city I had fallen in love with years earlier when my parents moved there in the early 1990s) and began to write.
First, I scoured the cafés of Leipzig for the perfect mix of delicious coffee, solid internet, and just the right level of mild background buzz. I fell in love with two great writing spots: Café Kater with its rickety wood furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows, and views of passing trams, and Jimmy Orpheus, cozy and conveniently located just a block from where I lived. Then I started to research and write. My mother is German, and I was raised in both the U.S. and Germany, so I speak German. I spent hours talking with new friends about their parents’ lives in the small East German towns scattered around Leipzig and about their own experiences of reunification as children or young adults. And I read countless books and articles, as well as a few dense legal tomes, about Germany’s division and reunification. Two years after beginning to write (and just before returning to the U.S. in 2019), I completed my first draft of a novel about the lingering and often painful impacts of German reunification. I had the opportunity to workshop the draft at Bread Loaf in Sicily (2018) as well as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont (2019) and continued to work on the manuscript through year-long courses at the Writer’s Center in Maryland and StoryStudio Chicago. After years of revising and a dizzying number of drafts, I am absolutely thrilled that Restitution will be published by Regal House in Fall of 2025, almost exactly 35 years after Germany’s reunification.
When I first started writing Restitution, I did not quite understand my peers who claimed that they couldn’t live without writing (after all, I’d managed for decades). But by the time I finished the manuscript, I’d become one of them. Above all, I am driven to write as a means of exploring how the political intersects with the deeply personal in our lives, how it shapes who we are and what we want, how it provides both motivation and constraint. I am already hard at work on a second novel while also pursuing an MFA in fiction at Randolph College in Virginia. When I am not writing, I love to go for long city walks or mountain hikes, play the piano, and of course, read. I am an ardent fan of black licorice and live in Washington, DC with my husband, two children, and the world’s best dog.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Tamar Shapiro’s Restitution in the fall of 2025.
