Bio:

Author’s Profile/Brief Biography

My name is Triene-Mie Le Compte. Like Alenka in my last manuscript, as a little girl I wanted to play the double bass, but at the age of 15, I quit high school and ended up studying violin and singing at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels. After that, I taught English in Japan and in Brazil for several years. I also worked in an international bank in Singapore and in the slums of South America. Currently, I am working at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, Europe.

I am a published author of 6 non-fiction books dealing with the European Union, verbal and mathematical comprehension, and the English and French languages. My sixth book (on education and training in the European Union) was published in August 2011. Since completing a public speaking seminar, I have been a guest speaker on these subjects at several universities.

Alenka Silverstein’s Secret Book is my first fiction book, and what I call a semi-autobiographical fairytale. I inherited the storytelling gene from my father. When I was a child, my parents were very poor and we lived in a small rented house with only three bedrooms: one for my parents, one for the three girls (in bunk beds; the room was so tiny there was space for only one bed) and one for the (then) six boys. Sometimes, daddy would not have money to buy food for a day or so. In the evenings, after work, we would all take a bath and put on our pajamas and then the whole family would sit on the stairs (the only place where there was room for all of us to sit together) and daddy would tell us stories that he invented on the spot. When he was very tired, he would continue the story the next evening.

When I was nine, we moved from this modest house to a lavish mansion. The new house had nine bedrooms and nine bathrooms, each one a different color. Here great scientists and scholars such as Linus Pauling (multiple Nobel Prize Winner), Hans Selye (researcher and inventor of the term “stress”) and C. Northcote Parkinson (British historian; Parkinson’s Law) would visit and my parents hosted fabulous house concerts at which we children as well as great musicians such as the American double bass player Gary Karr and many others would perform.

My mother is a well-known sculptress who has had musicians, sculptors and painters in her family traced back to the 15th century. My father was a famous gerontologist who was nominated for the Nobel Prize of Medicine in 1972. He loved music and musical instruments. He bought double basses, a cello, lutes, a silver flute, a tuba, a bassoon, a viola da gamba, a seventeenth-century violin and a Steinway grand piano, hoping his children would learn to play them. And we did.

Our wonderful fairytale life was marred by tragedy when my younger brother died when I was 12. As there are enough sad stories out there, I wanted to write a beautiful story that will bring smiles and comfort and warm feelings to people, especially to children. Unable to find any suitable modern literature for children who are confronted with personal loss, I wrote this book, integrating the wonderful and very personal memories of my childhood.

I am currently writing my next book, in the same magical fairytale style, but with a different subject and storyline.


Writer
Associate
Member since 2010
Region: Belgium

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Published In Children's Market: No