Laura Atkins is a petroleum engineer with a Master of Public Administration Degree from the Harvard Kennedy School. She spent much of her career in the upstream oil industry including abroad in Venezuela and Dubai. After obtaining the MPA from Harvard, she worked for OPEC in Vienna for three years and then for an energy consulting firm for seven years.
“My writing has been influenced by living overseas many years, an experience which heightened my appreciation of our democracy and rule of law based on the Constitution. When I moved back to the United States, I began to understand how vulnerable our political system is when wealthy special interests buy politicians and those who would impose their religious and cultural beliefs hijack the debate.”
Though she’s written technical reports and a few published op-eds, Shallow State is her first novel. Through the characters in the book, she shows how people’s lives can be upended and businesses and property destroyed under an authoritarian regime.
The incidents portrayed in this novel have all happened somewhere. Ms. Atkins has witnessed some of them first hand. If left unchecked, authoritarianism will lead to fascism and citizens will no longer have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It really can happen here.