Fiona Taylor

Although I am British I was raised in Zimbabwe and I have also lived in Italy, Spain, Malawi, Tanzania and South Africa, each of which has enriched the texture of my life and allowed my childhood dream of writing a novel to brew over time. A detour that involved a career in sales and marketing, marriage and raising three sons only nourished to the wonderful complexities of life that offer the groundwork for a story. I had the opportunity to establish some writing skills by completing a masters degree in creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) in 2017. The manuscript I am submitting for the Page Turner Writing Award is one that I wrote as part of my submission for my PhD, which I recently completed. The story is fiction, but it draws on real places and the actual contexts of ZImbabwe in the early 1980's and Spain in current times. I have long been interested in writing about this time with protagonists from different racial and cultural backgrounds, and examining the idea that it is not possible to fully escape our historical and social contexts.