Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—Cambridge, England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Awards—National Press Awards-Reporter of the Year
• Currently—lives in southwest France
Fiona Barton is a British journalist and novelist, born in Cambridge and now living in the southwest of France. She built a career in journalism: as senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at the Mail on Sunday. It was while working for that paper that she won Britain's National Press Award for Reporter of the Year.
Then, toward the end of 2004, in a "light bulb moment" over bad Chinese food, Barton and her husband, Gary, wondered what it would take to change the direction of their lives. As she told the Daily Mail:
I was 48 and a journalist, a job I’d loved and succeeded in for 25 years—Gary, 52, was a builder with his own business. We had two adult children, mortgages and all the paraphernalia of a full working life. Yet the idea of volunteering was so powerful that I remember it made our teeth chatter with excitement. We did lots of research talked to our family and, three years later, applied to Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO). It was both exhilarating and terrifying—we lived on £140 a month in a small flat, washing our clothes under a cold outside tap and coping with the occasional rat and cockroach. A year later [in 2008], we boarded a plane to Colombo in Sri Lanka to begin a two-year placement.
In Sri Lanka, Barton trained journalists facing exile and sometimes physical danger because of their work. Since then, she has worked with journalists from around the globe.
It was Barton's familiarity with news stories, however, that gave her ideas for novels she'd always hoped to write. Once liberated from the daily grind of deadlines, she was was able to turn to fiction. Her 2016 debut, The Widow, a story about a wife who suspects her husband of murder, became a bestseller and sold in 36 countries.
Next, in 2017, came The Child, which also grew out of a news story—the skeleton of a child discovered in a building site. Barton continues her writing, in the early morning, in bed, as she says on her website. Her only distraction is her noisy cockerel, Twitch. (Adapted from the author's website.)