Fiona Bowie

Fiona Bowie has been writing professionally since 1989, when she published her first book on Beguine Spirituality (translations by Oliver Davies) with SPCK/Crossroad. This was followed by studies on Hildegard of Bingen and Celtic Christian Spirituality in the same series. A move to the Welsh-speaking town of Bethesda in North Wales resulted in an edited collection of essays on 'Discovering Welshness' (Gwasg Gomer, also with Oliver Davies). After studying anthropology at Durham and Oxford universities, which included a period of fieldwork in Cameroon, Fiona Bowie taught at the Universities of Wales, Bristol, and King's College London (UK), Linkoping (Sweden) and Virginia (USA). She has written a best-selling textbook on the Anthropology of Religion (Blackwell), and edited volumes on The Coming Deliverer (University of Wales Press) and Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption (Berghahn). In 2010 she launched the Afterlife Research Centre, http://www.afterliferesearch.co.uk/, for the ethnographic study of the afterlife. Her most recent publication, Tales from the Afterlife (O Books), combines scholarship and imagination in presenting possible scenarios of our immediate post-mortem existence.