Extension School grad prepares for the Golden Globe Awards
Christine Leunens will be paying close attention to the Golden Globe Awards Sunday. That’s because “Jojo Rabbit,” based on her award-winning second novel, “Caging Skies,” is up for best picture honors — and is considered a likely Oscar nominee as well. Like the 2008 book on which it is based, Taika Waititi’s darkly satiric film is set in World War II Germany and follows a member of the Hitler Youth who protects and befriends a Jewish girl. A successful former print model, Leunens, A.L.M. ’04, published her first novel, “Primordial Soup,” in 1999. While finishing that book she decided that she wanted to find a way to delve deeper into the minds of her characters and the themes she was exploring. She decided to seek a master’s in literature at Harvard Extension School after concluding that “reading books on my own, however many, wasn’t going to adequately prepare me for the...