Ani Katz: It’s an Enormous Privilege To Be Able To Make Art
In this interview, author Ani Katz discusses how an unforeseen personal experience founds its way into her new literary novel, Haven.
Ani Katz is a writer, photographer, and teacher. She was born and raised on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, and holds an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BA from Yale. She lives in Brooklyn.
In this interview, Ani discusses how an unforeseen personal experience founds its way into her new literary novel, Haven, her advice to “keep writing” even when a project isn’t working, and more.
Name: Ani Katz
Literary agent: Julia Kenny
Book title: Haven
Publisher: Penguin
Release date: March 10, 2026
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Previous titles: A Good Man
Elevator pitch: Rosemary’s Baby with tech bros: a novel about a missing infant, the dystopian excesses of big tech, and an island for elites that isn’t what it seems.
What prompted you to write this book?
I was stuck on a different novel that wasn’t getting any better despite multiple radical revisions. While spending a weekend on Fire Island, my friend told me a story about a young couple and their new baby vacationing in a group rental in one of the beach communities on the island. During the week, the mother and her infant were left alone in a house full of hard-partying, childless strangers while the husband went back to the city, ostensibly for work, but actually to misbehave. I thought this sounded like a good premise for a novel in which the baby then disappears, and I decided I would take a break from my current albatross of a project and work what I thought would be a conventional locked-room thriller in a familiar setting—something fun and easy to write.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
It took almost five years, with some long breaks here and there. Over that time, my conventional locked-room thriller about a missing baby became something much more complex. Almost immediately, I knew the morally ambiguous husband and his friends had to work in tech, and this single decision opened the door to the dystopian, speculative themes of the novel. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was also embarking on what would end up being a difficult, multiyear process to have my own child. That harrowing personal experience seeped into the story and characters, along with the seemingly daily examples of venal elites dragging the rest of us into a techno-fascist hellscape, and ultimately I ended up writing a novel that was very different from what I originally envisioned.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
This is my second published novel, and overall, I’ve been most surprised by how sanguine I’ve felt about the process this time. Even during difficult moments—the inevitable waiting periods and hiccups in every publishing journey, or the times when I was grappling with intractable plot problems, or racing to finish a major revision before giving birth, or struggling to complete another revision when I had a newborn to care for—I’ve experienced less angst than I did with my first novel. There’s so much horrific evil in the world being perpetrated by the worst villains right now. It’s an enormous privilege to be able to make art, to have even just a handful of people in your corner who believe in it, and to have a chance to share it with a wider audience.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
When I started writing Haven, I had no idea it would become an instrument for exploring my deepest personal and political fears and preoccupations, or that its transformation from straightforward thriller to speculative horror would feel so intuitive and necessary. I’ve found that my best writing happens this way—in some sense, a story I couldn’t anticipate finds its way out of me, and when I look back at what I’ve done, I’m a little amazed that I was able to bring it onto the page. I look back on what was supposed to be a fun, easy page-turner and feel surprised, proud, and a little bewildered.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Readers will each have their own connection and reaction to this book, whether that’s identifying with the alienation of the postpartum experience, getting lost in the prose and the speculative setting it evokes, or shuddering in horror at what unfolds. My hope is that Haven prompts readers to think about the ethical compromises we are constantly asked to make and the evils that we are asked to ignore in order to live in some semblance of comfort and security, and how the pursuit of power and control destroys our individual and collective humanity. But I also hope they simply give the story a chance and go for the ride, even when it gets really weird.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
As cliche as it sounds, the one piece of advice that really matters is to keep writing. “Keep writing” can mean abandoning a book-in-progress that isn’t working, or saying goodbye to a finished book that will never see the light of day, even if you’ve poured literal years into those books. Start again, write another book. Keep writing when you get bad reviews on Goodreads or in the press, whether or not you think the criticism is fair. Keep writing even when no one is paying attention. Keep writing especially when no one is paying attention. Accept that writing is lonely and hard. Most importantly, accept that you will probably never in your life find the success or recognition you want, and keep writing.
