Fiona J Mackintosh
WriterI’m a British-American writer living near Washington D.C. I’m the author of The Yet Unknowing World, a collection of flash fictions, and a past winner of the Fish Flash Fiction Prize, the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and the Reflex Fiction Award. My historical novel Ancestral Virgins about subversive desire and the fine line between love and exploitation is currently on submission to agents.
About Me
But I grew up to embrace that vastness. My life now straddles the ocean. I fly over it at least twice a year. I’ve watched the dawn break over it, I’ve seen the Hale-Bopp comet high above it, I’ve looked down onto the changing towers of Manhattan, and followed the S-bend of the Thames as the plane turns over London to approach Heathrow from the east.
My geographical division began from day one. I was born in the United States to British parents. I have two birth certificates – one from the state of New Jersey and another from the British consulate in New York. After several years in the US, my parents decided to move back to the old country and I grew up in Scotland on the shores of the North Sea. I got an MA from the University of Edinburgh, then worked in London for several years, first in politics and then in television journalism. At the age of 29, I ran away to the US for a gap year and ended up settling in for the long haul.
Because of my transatlantic life, there is no single place I call home. Instead there are several. A former boss once told me that I gave the impression of always having “one foot off the island.” What better place for a writer to be?