CELIA CLAASE grew up and studied in South Africa where she taught young minds for many years. In 2008, her family relocated to Hong Kong where she has been working as an ESL teacher ever since. In her free time she writes and works on her latest series of oil paintings. Her art has been exhibited and sold in South Africa as well as Hong Kong. As a member of the Women in Publishing Society Hong Kong, she acts as coordinator of their annual short story competition for young writers. Sarie, a South African magazine, featured her memoirs for a period of several months and she has had poetry published in literary journals such as Imprint and Writers Abroad. Winner of a LitNet flash fiction prize, she also received an award from the HongKong Drama Association for writing an outstanding stage script. Celia, like the poet R.M. Rilke, chooses to be with those who know secret things. The intention behind her writing is to defamiliarize the world as we think we know it.

In 2010 Celia Claase started to write as a means of trying to define human existence and the reality in which we live. The resulting collection of narratives and poetry makes use of the evidence that physical science provides, in order to explain the metaphysical realm. This became possible through creative mind experiments. During the writing process she drew on years of self study and keen interest in the arts, philosophy, science, cosmology, spirituality and psychology.

The Layers Between unfolds its philosophical conceits with a kind of artfully organic movement; flowing as it does between carefully wrought, playful monologues and compact, pithy poems...an invitation to step into the world, and inhabit it with open eyes and minds.

-- Viki Holmes

author of miss moon’s class

(From her Advance Response to The Layers Between)

2 April 2016, CELIA CLAASE gave a well-prepared and challenging talk, introducing her book, "The Layers Between"  at the Proverse Readers' Club, Dymocks Books and Cafe, DIscovery Bay, Lantau, NT, Hong Kong.

An edited video of this has been uploaded to youtube at:

https://youtu.be/RCbF0iLWwtI

Celia Claase’s debut collection...takes one back to a moment even before the Big Bang to a present where the future is ultimately unknowable yet at the same time as close to us as our own inner layers of skin.... Claase recognizes the interrelationship of the physical and metaphysical, the seen and the unseen. ... She has the ability to cut through the illusions of material gain, security and power....The Layers Between is the recognition of ‘as above, so below’, and the joyous, yet calm, realization that samsara is nirvana and nirvana is samsara.

Gary Cummiskey

Johannesburg. July 2015 (from his Advance Response to The Layers Between)