Draft:Fiona Rintoul

Fiona Rintoul is a writer and translator who lives on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

Education
Rintoul studied French and German at St Andrews University in Fife. For an exchange programme in the third year, she chose to study behind the Iron Curtain at Karl Marx University, partly because she was a "bolshie" student. Rintoul arrived in Leipzig, East Germany, in March 1986. This was three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She told the BBC that although it "felt scary" at first and there was a lot of political propaganda "you just got used to it and started to have a good time".

Career
Rintoul became a financial journalist and the editor of London-based Funds Europe, a specialised pensions and investment management magazine. She contributed news stories about banking, asset allocation and funds management to the Financial Times between 2006 and 2015.

In 2014, her translation of Erziehung vor Verdun, the third of Arnold Zweig's Great War books, was published as Outside Verdun. The Independent described it as a "soberly portrayed view of that war [which] resonates long after the reading".

Her first novel, The Leipzig Affair, came out a year later. It drew on her experiences as a student and later visits to the reunified Germany to tell the tale of a "doomed love affair" between a young Scottish man and an East German woman in Leipzig in the dying days of the Cold War. The book was serialised on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. Douglas Henshall was one of the readers. It was shortlisted a Saltire Society award and won the Virginia prize for new women fiction writers from around the world. Margaret Drabble described it as "a page-turner that reminds one of the horrors of the Cold War".

Rintoul has since written two books exploring the Scotch industry. The first, Whisky Island (2016), was about Islay's single malt distilleries and the second was Whisky Cask Investment (2023).

Since 2021, Rintoul has contributed comment and opinion articles to the Scottish edition of The Times and to the Press & Journal, a newspaper that covers the Scottish Highlands.

Since the COVID lockdown she has been working on A Place Like This, a book about remote communities in the Outer Hebrides.