When she was ten years old, Katinka van der Kooij (1981), won an adult literary competition with an illustrated story where she painted a gruesome image of a butcher. She never stopped writing and drawing since. In 1999 she started to study Psychology at the University of Amsterdam to learn to better understand her characters. There she became interested in the mechanisms by which the brain translates the external world into personal experience. Today she investigates, as a PhD student at Utrecht University, how surroundings influence the perception of 3D shape. At the same time, she writes short stories that appeared in literary magazines. In these stories she plays with the perception of her readers and offers a view into the psyche of her characters. In October 2008 a collection of her short stories appeared at Dutch publishing house Prometheus, elected one of the best 15 debutes of 2010. As her writing is in Dutch, the English section of this website is mainly about her research.