She was born in East Anglia and gained a first class joint Honours degree in Geography and Education, going on to teach in London at one of the largest boys’ schools in the country. She is passionate about education and has travelled widely, teaching English in the Czech Republic and in Badjao communities in the Philippines. She has also worked as a portrait and landscape photographer. A love of creativity and art has taken her to galleries in different cities around the globe. She also sings and listens to jazz, has played in various orchestras and jazz bands, and has sung in choirs ranging from classical to gospel.

Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, inspired by her time in the Czech Republic, won The People’s Book Awards in 2013. She spent eight years living in Central Europe, and standing next to a ten million euro Canaletto painting in an auction house in Vienna sparked the idea for her second novel, a psychological thriller about the art underworld. The book was fuelled by a love of art.

Her short fiction has been longlisted in The New Writer Magazine Annual Prose and Poetry Prizes, and won the Litro Magazine Environmental Disaster Fiction Competition. She was shortlisted by Ad Hoc Fiction, Lunate Fiction and TSS Publishing, and nominated for Non Poetry Publication of the Year in the Spillwords Press Awards 2021. Her work was longlisted in the Reflex Press Quarterly International Flash Competition, and is forthcoming in Reflex Fiction, Volume Five: In Defence of Pseudoscience. She is a contributor to two other anthologies: Unthology 8 (Unthank Books) and Hearing Voices: The Litro Anthology of New Fiction.

Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories. Her work has been published in literary magazines and journals worldwide, including the Flash Flood Journal for the 10th Anniversary of National Flash Fiction Day in 2021 and in The South Shore Review, Issue 6, for their National Flash Fiction Day Edition, 2022. Her poems have appeared in various journals and podcasts. She has given book readings at The Library in Norwich and at a Pens of the Earth Event in collaboration with The Great Big Green Week, as well as book groups and a young carers group in Suffolk.

‘FC Malby is one of those writers who makes you sit up and pay attention. She’s a natural storyteller, a gifted wordsmith, and fearless in taking her imagination to the dark side when the story requires it.’ – Dan Coxon, fiction editor, Litro

She can be found at www.fcmalby.com.