Sophie Hannah (born 1971) is a British poet and novelist.
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. 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.
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. She has published five 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 (including "Rubbish at Adultery" and "Your Dad Did What?"), A-level, and degree level across the UK.[1]
Hannah 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.[2] Her fifth crime novel, Lasting Damage, was published in the UK on 17 February 2011.[3] 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[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] Hannah has referred to such works as "continuation novels," a subgenre of the crime novel. She has elaborated on the subgenre while reviewing examples by Ngaio Marsh/Stella Duffy and Dorothy L. Sayers/Jill Paton Walsh.[7]
Hannah has translated three children's picture books from Swedish as well as writing a work of social psychology entitled How to Hold a Grudge: from resentment to contentment: the power of grudges to transform your life.[8]
She won the 2023 Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library.[9]
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.[10]
The Swedish-language Moomin picture books were written and illustrated by Tove Jansson.
