Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her family was of Greek and Scots ancestry. Her father, a farmer, preached in a conservative Christian church founded by her grandfather. She married at 17, right after being graduated from Manheim Township High School and promptly gave birth to a daughter, Lara, whom she raised in Martha’s Vineyard. Lara is now a professional photographer in Los Angeles.

Wiggins lived in London for 16 years and for brief stints in Paris, Brussels and Rome.

She and Salman Rushdie wed in January 1988. On a book tour in the US, the couple learned on February 14, 1989 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had ordered Rushdie killed for blasphemy in the book The Satanic Verses. As a result, Wiggins went into protective hiding in Great Britain, along with Rushdie. In 1993, the two divorced.

“I have lived a really interesting life,” she told Pamela J. Johnson in July 2006. “I haven’t lived it so I can excavate material for my writing.” She added, “I’m a novelist. I don’t have those muscles. It’s not about me. It’s about what I’ve imagined. It’s the universal voice that I want to move forward. That’s my natural voice.”

She currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where she has been in the English department of the University of Southern California since fall, 2005.

Wiggins won a Whiting Writer's Award in 1989. Ten authors annually win this award, currently $40,000, not for a specific work, but for exceptional talent and promise. She was a National Book Award Finalist in 2003 for Evidence of Things Unseen.

Novels

• Babe, 1975, was the story of a single mother.
• Went South, 1980.
• Separate Checks, 1984, a short-story writer recovers from a nervous breakdown.

After this book was published, Wiggins was able to support herself and her daughter from her novels.

• Herself in Love, 1987.
• John Dollar, 1989, Eight girls, marooned on an island.

Won the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize for best novel written by an American woman.

• Eveless Eden, 1995, the romance between a war correspondent and photographer.

Story suggested by then-husband Salman Rushdie.

Shortlisted for 1996 Orange Prize.

• Almost Heaven, 1998.
• Evidence of Things Unseen, 2003, the dawn of the atomic age is seen through the eyes of Fos, an amateur chemist in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and Opal, a glassblower's daughter.

Nominated for 2003 National Book Award.

Gold medal for 2004 Commonwealth Club Prize (Fiction).

Finalist for 2004 Pulitzer Prize.

• The Shadow Catcher, 2007, dual narrative threading early life of photographer Edward Curtis and current life of "Marianne Wiggins."

Collections

• Bet They'll Miss Us when We're Gone, 1991