About

Photo credit: Diana Moschitz 

F.C. Malby has travelled widely, teaching English in the Czech Republic, in Badjao communities in the Philippines and in London. She is passionate about education and graduated with a first class joint honours degree in Geography and Education. She has also worked as a portrait and landscape photographer. 

F.C. Malby’s second novel, Dead Drop (Linen Press, Oct 2022), described as a ‘fast-paced, intelligent thriller,’ takes you on a journey through Vienna’s art underworld. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle (2012), won The People’s Book Awards (2013). She has been a reader for Reflex Press and will be reading for Five Minutes Literary Magazine in 2024.

Her short fiction has been longlisted in The New Writer Magazine Annual Prose and Poetry Prizes, nominated for Publication of the Year in the Spillwords Press 2021 Awards,  and won the Litro Magazine Environmental Disaster Fiction Competition. Her work was also shortlisted by Ad Hoc Fiction, TSS Publishing and Lunate Fiction. ‘We were absolutely staggered by the quality of the writing by the four runners-up. Each one a micro marvel. Competition was fierce.’ Lunate Fiction.

Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo (2015), includes award-winning stories, many of which have been published in literary magazines and journals worldwide. She is a contributor to several anthologies, including In Defence of Pseudoscience: Reflex Fiction Volume Five (Reflex Press, July 2022), with a story longlisted in the Reflex Press Quarterly International Flash Competition, as well as Unthology 8 (Unthank Books, 2016), and Hearing Voices: The Litro Anthology of New Fiction (Kingston University Press, 2015), alongside Pulitzer prize winner, Anthony Doerr. It has been described as containing, ‘some of the most exciting and unique new voices to have appeared in modern fiction over the last few years.’

F.C. Malby’s short fiction has been widely published online in places like Litro Magazine, Ether Books, Spontaneity Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Ad Hoc Fiction, Vending Machine Press, Flash Fiction Magazine, Paragraph Planet, Train Lit Magazine, The Drabble, Spelk Fiction, Fictive Dream, Virtual Zine, The Cabinet of Heed, Flash Fiction Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Lunate Fiction, Idle Ink and Roi Fainéant Press, among others, and is forthcoming in Five Minutes Lit 2024. Her work has also been published in the Flash Flood Journal for the 10th Anniversary of National Flash Fiction Day, 2021 and in The South Shore Review, Issue 6, for the National Flash Fiction Day Edition, 2022. 

Her poetry has been published in various online journals and podcasts. She has given book readings at the Unthank Books launch of Unthology 8, at The Library in Norwich, and at a Pens of the Earth event in collaboration with ‘The Great Big Green Week’ (Sept 2021). Pens of the Earth are crowdfunding to publish a book of stories, poems and environmental articles, including her short story, Prolific. All profits from book sales will go to the Solent Seagrass Restoration Project.

F.C. Malby has also given writing workshops in schools and readings at book groups, including a young carers group in Suffolk. Having lived in Vienna, Austria, for eight years, she now lives by the coast in the UK with her family. She is currently a school governor and is studying for a Masters in Theology.