Author Spotlight: Fiona Vigo Marshall

A traumatised concert pianist escaping to a cliff-top house and a near-derelict publishing company waiting for a miracle to escape financial disaster. These are the stories explored by the wonderful Fiona Vigo Marshall, whose characters stay with you long after closing the book.

Born in London and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, Fiona’s writing career started on a local newspaper in south London, after which she worked as a journalist in Mexico City. Returning to London, she pursued a career in publishing. Her short stories and poems have been nominated for numerous awards, including the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, which she won in 2016 with her short story ‘The Street of Baths’. She was also a finalist for the Reeds in the Wind International Literary Prize 2021. Her work has appeared in Prospect, Ambit, The Royal Society of Literature Review, Orbis International Literary Journal, The London Journal of Fiction and many other publications. Fiona has published two novels with Fairlight Books. Her debut novel, Find Me Falling (2019), was shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 2020, and The House of Marvellous Books (2022) has charmed readers up and down the country.

To learn more about Fiona and her journey as a storyteller, we invited her to do a short Q&A with us, which can be read below.

Q: How did you start writing?

A: By telling myself stories in my head from a young age. It took quite a while to realise they needed to be translated onto paper, of course. I thought they were just part of everyday life, and the discrimination between reality and fantasy was not always immediately apparent to me. It was quite a relief when – somewhat older – I came across Jorge Luis Borges’ saying, ‘Reality is not always probable, or likely’. Physically, I started writing at the age of twenty-one for a local newspaper in south-east London – a great training in anchorage.

Q: What does writing mean to you?

A: A vocation.

Q: How is non-fiction writing different from fiction writing? 

A: Non-fiction can be very worthy – you need a light touch so as not to patronise the reader, yet the information has to be clearly and accurately presented. The writing persona needs to be lively, warm, preferably unbiased, and trustworthy. In fiction, you can take a grain of reality and spin a fantastical pearl around it. Fiction allows me to reinterpret reality in extreme terms if I wish. You can’t eavesdrop on real life and then report it straight for fiction – that doesn’t work, or not for me. However, make no mistake, in both non-fiction and fiction, writing is graft!

Q: Do you feel like your writing style has changed over the years?

A: I hope so! When I started out I was covering golden weddings, prize-winning pumpkins and scout jumble sales for the local paper! An excellent grounding for a writer. Now I take more liberties – I like to push language a little to see how far it will go. I allow myself to use adjectives, for example.

Q: What’s your favourite book and who is your favourite author?

A: Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence.

Lawrence was my favourite author from the age of seventeen and a deep influence for many years, despite his silliness and naivety about women, and the execrable writing he produced after he lost touch with his roots. I still have a shelf of DHL – like any old friend, he can be exasperating, but when he’s at his best, as in describing a windy English spring, he’s one of the life-givers.

Q: Do you have a pet peeve when it comes to writing? Something you notice yourself doing or something you pick up in others’ writing?

A: Writing in the present tense. A shame, because the whole of Find Me Falling is in the present tense! In the future, all my writing will be properly in the past! More generally, Seamus Heaney said that the gift of writing is to be self-forgetful. I think it’s good to have that in mind.

Q: Do you have a writer’s habit that helps you ‘get in the zone’?

A: Coffee and silence. I sometimes use a long playlist of modern Andean folk music, or a soundtrack of storm sounds.

Q: Do you have a writing schedule?

A: First thing every day if I can, from around 7am. I rarely do more than three hours – after that, it’s gone. Some days I have to give up. D.H. Lawrence says, ‘Don’t write if you’re out of mood. Don’t force yourself. And wait for grace.’

Q: Where do you tend to write?

A: In bed on my laptop, and occasionally on the seafront or in seaside cafés.

Q: What’s a piece of advice you can give to aspiring authors?

A: Write. Submit. Write.

Start small with flash fiction to build confidence – there are so many outlets. Keep a record of your submissions. And be true to yourself.

Discover Fiona’s Stories:

Find Me Falling (2019) – Available here

She bought a house where you can hear the sea, murmuring on the edge of consciousness…

Bonnie, a traumatised concert pianist, finds refuge at the edge of England, in a cliff-top house haunted by memories and broken dreams.

When Dominic, a road sweeper who is visited by neurological hauntings of his own, gives Bonnie a ring he finds on the street, elemental forces are unleashed that neither is able to control.

The House of Marvellous Books (2022) – Available here

Tucked away in a near-derelict library in the centre of London, The House of Marvellous Books is a publishing house on the brink of financial disaster. With assistant Ursula asleep at her desk, head publisher Gerard going health and safety mad, and chief editor Drusilla focused on finding a supposedly priceless but famously missing manuscript, there is hardly anyone left to steer the ship.

Young Mortimer Blakeley-Smith, junior editor, charts the descent of the House in his logbook as it lurches from one failure to the next. Will mysterious Russian buyers, lurking in the wings, finally sink the ship? Or will Drusilla find the legendary Daybreak Manuscript and save the day?

We hope you enjoyed our spotlight on Fiona Vigo Marshall. To learn more about Fiona, as well as read an exclusive extract from The House of Marvellous Books, you can visit her author profile here. If you would like to keep up to date with our short stories, be sure to sign up to our newsletter.