MELANIE FINN
Melanie Finn was born and raised in Kenya and the US. She describes her childhood as "unsupervised" and remembers how a large python ate all the small pets near her Nairobi home. After studying journalism at New York University, she worked as a freelance journalist in Asia, Australia and East Africa. In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles and became a staff writer for the hit SHOWTIME series, The Red Shoe Diaries. She then worked as a ranch hand in the Californian desert and a ski bum in New Mexico before meeting her husband, Matthew Aeberhard, in Tanzania in 2001. Her first novel, Away From You, published by Penguin in 2004, was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Award. It was described by Helen Dunmore as, "a deeply affecting book with its own atmosphere of strong light and brilliant detail" and by Esther Freud as "a delicately crafted and powerfully evocative novel". She and Matthew collaborated on The Crimson Wing, a wildlife feature film for Disney Nature that was released globally to critical acclaim in 2009. While filming on location in Tanzania, she founded the East Lake Natron Health Project to bring better medical care to the rural communities in the Lake Natron Area. Currently, she and Matthew are back in New Mexico, busy with their latest and most ambitious project: twin girls.
LATEST BOOK: AWAY FROM YOU
When Ellie's father dies she has to return to Kenya after twenty-five years to wind up his affairs. She becomes embroiled in trying to discover the secret at the heart of his life and her parents' marriage in 1960's Kenya. It was a time of keeping up appearances, stiff whiskies, English gardens amidst the African Bush, and reined in violence. Told through three voices and set against the poignant backdrop of a changing Africa, this is a wonderfully atmospheric novel about fathers, daughters and Africa.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Away From You, Penguin, 2004, St Martin's Press (US).
