Fiona Wood

Fiona Wood writes Australian teen fiction about friendship, class, family, and the challenge of seeing oneself clearly. Cloudwish centers on Vân Ước Phan, a quiet Vietnamese Australian student who doubts magic but makes a wish involving popular classmate Billy Gardiner. When his attention suddenly turns toward her, the apparent fulfillment places Vân Ước in the visibility she has tried to avoid. Wood weaves the plot around first love, school pressure, cultural identity, and Vân Ước's reading of Jane Eyre, allowing literature to sharpen rather than solve her questions. Pan Macmillan first published Cloudwish in Australia in 2015; Poppy, a Little, Brown imprint, issued the American edition in 2016. The novel won both the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers and the Australian Independent Booksellers' teen-fiction award. Wood gives Vân Ước a reflective, skeptical voice, so the possible wish matters less as fantasy machinery than as a lens on belonging, confidence, and unequal opportunity.