Name Maria Cruz Education Heriot-Watt University | Role Author | |
Books The Adventures of Camila in the Oil World | ||
Maria Carolina Cruz is a British-Colombian author.
Contents
Career
Before becoming a published writer, Cruz worked in the oil industry occupying various positions in the oil multinationals British Petroleum and Shell International. She graduated with an MSc.in Petroleum Engineering from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Due to her technical contributions in the area of engineering in the United Kingdom, she was awarded British citizenship and now lives in London.
Books
Her first published book was The Adventures of Camila in the Oil World, an invitation to young girls to follow subjects that have been traditionally chosen only by boys at school. In her first book, Camila, a precocious young girl is the star. One day, playing on the beach, she spots a large steel structure in the middle of the sea and she asks her dad what it is. He tells her it is an offshore platform but that only men work in such a place. This is a challenge that Camila cannot resist and deliberately she sets to become qualified to make it in such world. The story of Camila is almost a biographical compilation of the real life of Maria Carolina Cruz who has been one of the few women in the world to have worked in the Offshore Oil Platforms of the North Sea.
Her second book, The Adventures of Grobje and the Crew of Pirates is a book for children and adults that discusses the importance of safety in the work place. The book uses a very simple language and a collection of superb illustrations. Having experienced two fatalities in her work place, Maria Carolina Cruz sets to remind the reader of her second book that each person in the world has the power to preserve life or to destroy it. The book is an excellent reminder of how a safe behavior can change everybody's life for good.
Current job
Cruz has founded and is currently Director of Planet Alice Productions Ltd, a book and music Publishing Company in England. She runs her company in London and is expecting to open the first branch of her company outside of the EU when Planet Alice Turkiye is launched in Istanbul on January 2010. [1]
Cruz is the author of an ongoing collection of articles written to empower and motivate women in the work place. [2]
Cruz as a featured speaker
Cruz has featured as a speaker in the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair with the talk Girly Girls who Build Rockets and Manly Boys who are not Afraid of Them Her talk in the conference and her books led to an article in the Turkish Newspaper SABAH where her books are chosen as five of the best books for children at the Frankfurt Book Fair.