Patti M. Valkenburg holds a doctorate in the social sciences from Leiden University was a professor of communication science at the University of Amsterdam for thirty years. She has written multiple non-fiction books on the impact of (social) on individuals and society, with publishers including Prometheus, Balans, Boom, Rainbow Pockets, Yale University Press, and Routledge. For her work she received the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific distinction in the Netherlands. In recent years she has turned to literary fiction, driven by the stories that science cannot tell.