Fiona Joyce, a writer and creative-writing teacher, lives near Montpellier in southern France with her 11-year-old son Marmaduke. When she arrived in France in 2003, she found she could only speak Greek, the result of a couple of years of Aegean island-hopping in her teens: ‘My brain apparently decided a foreign language was required and it must be this one!’

Happily she was eventually able to re-train her brain to ignore youthful smatterings of ‘Ellinika’ and learn French instead.

As Fiona Dunscombe, she won The Dundee International Book Prize for her first novel ‘The Triple Point of Water’. She has also written radio drama, poetry, short stories, and articles on French life. An essay on the novel was published this year by Cambridge Scholars (in ‘Generic Instability and Identity in the Contemporary Novel’ ; eds Gonzalez/Hedon), and she is currently writing a second novel, provisionally titled ‘Connecting’.