Sophie Hannah


Sophie Hannah is a British poet and novelist. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and between 1999 and 2001 a junior research fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge.

Biography

Sophie Hannah was born in Manchester, England; her father was the academic Norman Geras and her mother is the author Adèle Geras. She attended Beaver Road Primary School in Didsbury and the University of Manchester.

Publications

Hannah published her first book of poems, The Hero and the Girl Next Door, at the age of 24. Her style is often compared to the light verse of Wendy Cope and the surrealism of Lewis Carroll. Her poems' subjects tend toward the personal, utilizing classic rhyme schemes with understated wit, humour, and warmth. She has published five previous collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. In 2004, she was named one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her poems are studied at GCSE, A-level, and degree level across the UK.
While Hannah has authored a book for children, she is better known for her psychological crime novels. Her first novel, Little Face, was published in 2006 and has sold more than 100,000 copies. Her fifth crime novel, Lasting Damage, was published in the UK on 17 February 2011. Kind of Cruel, her seventh psychological thriller to feature the characters Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer, was published in 2012.
Her 2008 novel The Point of Rescue was produced for TV as the two-part drama Case Sensitive and shown on 2 and 3 May 2011 on the UK's ITV network. It stars Olivia Williams in the lead role of DS Charlie Zailer and Darren Boyd as DC Simon Waterhouse. Its first showing had 5.4 million viewers. A second two-part story based on The Other Half Lives was shown on 12 and 13 July 2012.
In addition to works entirely of her own devising, Hannah has written a series of novels based on Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. She has referred to such works as "continuation novels," a subgenre of the crime novel. She has elaborated on the subgenre while reviewing examples written by Ngaio Marsh/Stella Duffy and Dorothy Sayers/Jill Paton Walsh.
Hannah has translated three children's picture books from Swedish as well as written a work of social psychology entitled How to Hold a Grudge: from resentment to contentment: the power of grudges to transform your life.

Other professional activities

Hannah participated in the creation of a master's degree in Crime and Thriller Writing at the University of Cambridge, for which she is the main teacher and course director.

Works

For young children

;Translations
The Swedish-language Moomin picture books were written and illustrated by Tove Jansson.
  1. Little Face
  2. Hurting Distance ; also published as The Truth-Teller's Lie
  3. The Point of Rescue ; also as The Wrong Mother
  4. The Other Half Lives also as The Dead Lie Down
  5. A Room Swept White also as The Cradle in the Grave
  6. Lasting Damage also as The Other Woman's House
  7. Kind of Cruel
  8. The Carrier
  9. The Telling Error also as Woman with a Secret
  10. Pictures Or It Didn’t Happen also as The Warning: A Short Story
  11. The Narrow Bed also as The Next to Die

    Hercule Poirot