Kim Hays
Kim Hays is a dual citizen (Swiss/American) who has made her home in Bern since she married a Swiss. Before that she lived in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm, as well as the US, her birthplace. Since the age of seventeen she has worked at a wide variety of jobs, from factory forewoman to director of a small nonprofit and, in Switzerland, from sociology lecturer to cross-cultural trainer. She began writing mysteries when her son left for college. Pesticide, the first book in the Polizei Bern series, featuring detectives Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli, will be published by Seventh Street Books on April 19, 2022. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association. Hays has a BA in English history and literature from Harvard and a PhD in cultural sociology from UC-Berkeley. The Rest of the Story When I was twenty-six, I met my husband, Peter, on a park bench in the south of France. A week after our wedding, we settled in his hometown of Bern in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and I’ve lived here ever since. In fact, we’re still in the same neighborhood we moved to as newlyweds. In between being born in the US and moving to Bern, I lived in twenty homes; six of those were in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm. Being forced to learn new languages and adapt to different cultures from childhood on turned out to be very useful preparation for marrying a Swiss and moving to Switzerland. Peter and I have a son, Thomas.
