About the author
Hillie Kuipers was born in Losser, the Netherlands to a working-class family. Most of her life she worked in the care giving industry. She also produced and presented a program at a regional radio station.
Hilly has two grown children, Sonja and Erik. She presently lives on the Greek island of Samos in the eastern part of the Aegean Sea.
Hillie Kuipers has two published books in the Dutch language, Kèlenòh (2008), and the prologue to her first book, Terug naar Samos (Return to Samos) (2015).
Hillie made her transition on March 26, 2022.
About the writing of Kelenoh
It all began innocently enough. In 1986, Hillie Kuipers was invited to accompany her friend and former husband on a vacation for three weeks to the Greek Island of Samos, a place she didn’t know anything about.
As soon as she stepped off the plane onto Samos, everything felt and looked very familiar; the smells, the vistas, the mountains. To her astonishment, something strange began happening. She started seeing and having mental pictures flash across her mind, which, in her opinion, couldn’t be real. They were visions of a Samos during ancient times.
At first she was confused, and not at all sure what it all meant or why. Eventually, for her own sanity, she decided to write everything down in a notebook. Thus, over the span of many years and many return trips to Samos, a story began to unfold.
Several of the events she had seen in her visions were not common historical knowledge but, to her relief, were later confirmed by people with more in-depth knowledge of the island during antiquity, from existing historical facts, and modern excavations. These validations gave her the confidence that what she saw were actual events from the past. Eventually, years later, she began to accept that the woman she saw in her visions, the High Priestess of the Temple of Hera, was a previous embodiment of hers. Up until then she had considered reincarnation to be a strange notion and hadn’t given it much thought.
Around 1999, 13 years after her first visit to Samos, she began compiling all her visions in an orderly manner and started writing a book about what she had seen and experienced.
After Hillie finished her manuscript, she couldn’t find a publisher. A close friend advised her to change her story from first person format to third person. It took Hillie six months to convince herself to start all over again and rewrite her book. That was in 2005.
She had finished the first page when, out of nowhere, she heard a sentence in her head, ‘The sand of the desert is hot under her bare feet.’ She ignored it and kept writing what she intended to write. However, the sentence kept repeating itself. Finally giving in, she got a blank piece of paper and typed the sentence on it, if only to make that bothersome thought go away. She paused for a brief moment after completing the sentence, when suddenly she was transported to another time and place. She was in the desert and she was Kelenoh.
The whole story unfolded in this way, writing faithfully for two hours every day what she experienced over the span of the next two years. The story of Kelenoh – the last High Priestess of the Temple of Hera on Samos. She, who possessed the knowledge of ancient wisdom.
The first publisher she contacted after that, accepted the completed manuscript, Kèlenòh.