Fiona Neill

Fiona Neill was born in Hackney, London in 1966. She grew up on a farm in an isolated village in North Norfolk, where she still spends as much time as possible. She graduated with a first class degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies at The University of Bristol in 1989 and went on to do an MA in politics at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London. Her third year at university was spent in Latin America where she lived and worked with Salvadorean refugees in Nicaragua and learnt to make jewellery in the Andean mountains of Peru.

After university she went to live in Central America for a year and ended up staying for six. The first two years she worked for a group of international aid organisations that had projects with refugees in Latin America. She worked in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua writing reports on refugees who had fled their homes because of civil war. Based on these trips, she began writing for The Baltimore Sun, The St Petersburg Times and The Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

From 1993 she worked for three years as the correspondent for Reuters based in Guatemala before returning to the United Kingdom to join Marie Claire magazine as features editor. She then joined The Times Magazine as assistant editor for three years before returning to life as a freelance feature writer.

Fiona Neill's first novel The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy was based on her weekly column in The Times and published in 2007. It went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller and has sold worldwide in twenty-five countries, including the US, where an extract appeared in American Vogue. It has been optioned in the US by ABC to create a television series. Her second novel Friends, Lovers and Other Indiscretions was published by Random House in May 2009. Fiona Neill lives in London with her husband and three children. She is currently working on a third novel and a series for Radio 4 called Famous Footsteps which began on January 12th at 9:30 am.