Fiona Vigo Marshall

Fiona Vigo Marshall is the author of Find Me Falling (2019) and The House of Marvellous Books (2022).

Fiona was born in London and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her debut novel Find Me Falling was shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 2020. The House of Marvellous Books is her second novel.

Her 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.

A short Q&A with Fiona Vigo Marshall can be read below:

How did you start writing?

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.

What does writing mean to you?

A vocation.

How is non-fiction writing different from fiction writing? 

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!

Read our full interview with Fiona about The House of Marvellous Books (along with an exclusive extract) here.