The Call and Craft of the Catholic Novelist: An Interview with Fiorella De Maria

The Call and Craft of the Catholic Novelist: An Interview with Fiorella De Maria, author of Poor Banished Children: A Novel | Ignatius Insight | June 28, 2011

Novelist Fiorella De Maria, author of Poor Banished Children, was born in Italy of Maltese parents. She grew up in Wiltshire, England, and attended Cambridge, where she received a BA in English Literature and a Masters in Renaissance Literature, specializing in the English verse of Robert Southwell, S.J. She won the National Book Prize of Malta (foreign language fiction category) for her second novel The Cassandra Curse. Fiorella lives in Surrey with her husband and her three children and blogs at "The Singular Anomaly". She recently answered some questions from Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight, about her novel and the craft of writing fiction.

Ignatius Insight: How did you end up becoming a novelist? What sort of personal and educational paths brought you to that point?

Fiorella De Maria: I have wanted to be a writer since I was about seven. As a child I always had my nose in a book and spent blissful hours in my room reading absolutely any novel I could lay my hands on. Reading teaches you so much about the art of writing;  how to make a character come to life, how to create atmosphere with a few words. I was very fortunate in that I grew up in a rural area where it was safe for a child to go out alone and I could walk for miles through the Wiltshire countryside completely undisturbed, dreaming that I was in Narnia or Wonderland or whatever world I had just read about. It is a stunningly beautiful part of the world; I used to think that Tolkien had been thinking of Wiltshire when he created The Shire. I was very blessed to grow up in such a lovely and evocative place.

I had some very supportive English teachers when I was at secondary school who really encouraged me to write and to have a go at writing all sorts of things so that I could find out what came most naturally – articles, poetry, short stories, I even wrote a couple of plays – and they offered constructive criticism and feedback. Then at Cambridge, I had the chance to study the development of the novel in depth and did courses in modern literature so that I could learn as much as possible about what contemporary novelists were writing about.

Read the entire interview on Ignatius Insight....