FIONA LOWE is an Australian author whose bestselling novels are often set in small country towns, exploring real-life issues – family dramas, mysteries, and secrets tangled with lies and moral dilemmas.
Her latest book, The Drowning, follows four friends who inherit a beach house.
We asked Fiona to share five surprising things about herself.
MEET FIONA LOWE
1. As a child, I lived in Madang, PNG for three years.
We swam most days in the hotel pool (now a resort, still same pool). We arrived once to find dolphins swimming in it. One day, I slipped and fell into the swamp at the back of the property. Terrified, I shot out of the black and murky water onto the bank. My laughing family assured me that mud was the worst thing in the swamp. The crocodile surfaced two days later ….
2. I had to learn how to tap dance for an amateur production of Dinkim Assorted.
Coordination isn’t my strong point. I failed aerobics in the ’90s. The dance teacher did a lot of sighing and stuck me in the back. Not wanting to let the cast down, I practised and practised the time-step only to find myself moved to the front row at dress rehearsal where I was then expected to dance and smile. Perhaps persistence isn’t the best thing …
3. I adored being a midwife; it’s a privilege being in the room during one of the most significant events of a woman’s life.
I once delivered twins on Christmas morning. Funniest story was the husband who arrived halfway through his wife’s labour looking a little seedy and having come straight from a planned vasectomy as the baby was two weeks late!
4. My husband unexpectedly took a job in the US and from the offer to the starting date was three weeks.
It’s amazing how fast you can pack up a house. He went to work 24 hours after we arrived, and I strapped the baby into the mei-tai and went and found us somewhere to live. At least it was before six months of snow …
5. I’m an agricultural show homecrafts tragic!
Each year I enter baking, preserves and knitting, and harangue the family into joining me. I LOVE the displays and I’m in awe of the talent out there in the community. Have a crack yourself!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fiona Lowe has been a midwife, a sexual health counsellor and a family support worker; an ideal career for an author who writes novels about family and relationships. She spent her early years in Papua New Guinea, where without television, reading was the entertainment and it set up a lifelong love of books. One of her first teenage rebellions was refusing to go on a hike with her parents because she was half way through Gone with The Wind.
Although she often re-wrote the endings of books in her head, it was the birth of her first child that prompted her to write her first novel. A recipient of the prestigious USA RITA® award and the Australian RuBY award, Fiona’s books are set in small country towns and feature real people facing tough choices and explore how family ties impact on their decisions.
When she’s not writing stories, she’s a distracted wife, mother of two ‘ginger’ sons, a volunteer in her community, guardian of 80 rose bushes, slave to a cat and is often found collapsed on the couch with wine.
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