Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah (born 1971, Manchester, England) is an English-born poet and novelist. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a junior research fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She currently resides with her husband and two children in Cambridge.

Biography

Sophie Hannah's father is the academic and author Norman Geras and her mother is the author Adéle Geras. She attended the same primary school and classes as noted space historian Francis French. She was educated at the University of Manchester and 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 four 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.

Hannah is also the author of a book for children and six 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, is due to be published in the UK on February 17, 2011.. As of February 2011, Hannah is at work on Kind of Cruel, her seventh psychological thriller to feature the characters Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer.

Her 2008 novel The Point of Rescue was produced for TV as a two part drama named "Case Sensitive" and shown on May 2 and May 3 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. It's first showing had 5.4 million viewers

Poetry

• Early Bird Blues, 1993 (Limited Edition Pamphlet)
• Second Helping of Your Heart, 1994 (Limited Edition Pamphlet)
• The Hero and the Girl Next Door (Carcanet Press,1995)
• Hotels Like Houses, (Carcanet Press, 1996)
• Leaving and Leaving You, (Carcanet Press, 1999)
• Love Me Slender: Poems About Love, 2000
• First of the Last Chances, (Carcanet Press, 2003)
• Selected Poems, 2006
• Pessimism for Beginners, (Carcanet Press, 2007)

Children's books

• The Box Room, Poems for Children
• Carrot the Goldfish (1992)

Crime Fiction

• Little Face (2006)
• Hurting Distance (2007) also published as The Truth-Teller's Lie (2010)
• The Point of Rescue (2008) also published as The Wrong Mother (2009)
• The Other Half Lives (2009) also published as The Dead Lie Down (2009)
• A Room Swept White (2010)
• Lasting Damage (2011)
• Kind of Cruel (TBA)

Short story collections

• The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets (2008)

Fiction

• The Superpower of Love, 2002
• Cordial and Corrosive: an unfairy tale, 2000
• Gripless, 1999

Translation

• The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My by Tove Jansson
• Who Will Comfort Toffle? by Tove Jansson

External links

• Contemporary Writers
• Sophie Hannah Official Website
• Radio interview (2009)