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 family 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, a book for children and two psychological crime novels, Little Face in 2006 and Hurting Distance in 2007.

In 2004, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. Her poems are studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK.

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)

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
• Carcanet Press, Sophie Hannah's Poetry Publishers
• Radio interview (2009)