Christina Oxenberg is a Serbian-American writer, humorist, and fashion designer. She has written seven books, and her writing has been featured in magazines and publications like Allure, The Sunday Times, Huffington Post, and others. Her two knitwear clothing lines, Christina Oxenberg and Ox, have appeared in Barneys, Bloomingdale's, and luxury boutiques throughout the world. Oxenberg is the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and is a descendant of the Serbian House of Karađorđević.
After high school, Oxenberg worked various jobs in New York ranging from a secretary to a roller-rink attendant. She would then go on a backpacking trip around the world before returning to New York City. Upon her return, Oxenberg secured a job at Studio 54. Between 1984 and 1985, she worked as a research assistant for historian, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, on his book Blenheim Revisited. In 1986, she published her first book, Taxi, a collection of celebrity anecdotes and personal observations revolving around experiences in taxicabs. In Taxi, Andy Warhol, Bob Costas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and numerous others are featured. Christina Oxenberg married painter Damian Elwes near Amman, Jordan, in May 1986. They later divorced. In 1994, Simon & Schuster commissioned Oxenberg to write a semi-autobiographical novel that would eventually be published as Royal Blue. The novel was released in 1997 in the United States and was published by Quartet in the United Kingdom in 1998. The book is fictional but contains true elements. The book received generally favorable reviews from publications like The IndependentThe Guardian, and The Times. As a result of the book, Oxenberg appeared on the cover of New York Magazine and was profiled in People. It was called "darkly funny" by the Chicago Tribune. In 2000, Oxenberg went on hiatus from writing and took a job at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Waterkeeper Alliance. Through that job she met Fernando Alvarez, a Peruvian businessman living in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The two discussed the possibility of a clothing line using Oxenberg's name. They designed, produced and wholesaled a collection of knitwear. The pair used fibers such as the guanaco from Patagonia, the suri-alpaca from the high Andes and the muskox from the indigenous population in the North West Territories of Canada. From 2002 to 2010, Oxenberg produced two clothing lines. Christina Oxenberg would go on to self-publish several collections of short stories between 2010 and 2014, including Do These Gloves Make My Ass Look Fat?, Life is Short: Read Short Stories, and When in Doubt...Double the Dosage. Additionally, her writing has appeared in publications like Allure, Penthouse, The Sunday Times, Takimag, HuffPost, and others. In 2011, she moved from the Northeastern United States to Key West, Florida. Many of the stories in her short story collections like Will Write for Compliments and Life is Short: Read Short Stories are about or set in Key West. Since 2012 Oxenberg has contributed articles to Key West weekly magazine Konk Life. In 2014, Oxenberg helped organize a visit by John Hemingway to David Wolkowsky's Tennessee Williams Collection. In 2015, Christina Oxenberg moved to Serbia for a year to write and research her book, Royal Dynasty – An Insider's History of the Serbian Royal Family, which was published in Serbian in 2015 by the publisher, Laguna. For her work, Oxenberg received an award from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2016. In February 2018, Dynasty: A True Story was published in English in the UK by the publisher, Quartet Books. Subsequently, Oxenberg was interviewed by the Sunday Times, Radio Gorgeous and Tatler, and she presented the book at the Oxford Literary Festival on 22 March 2018.
