Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah (born 1971) 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. She 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.

Hannah is also the author of a book for children and several 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.

Works

For young children

• Carrot the Goldfish, illustrated by Jean Baylis (Hamish Hamilton, 1992)
• The Box Room: poems for children (Orchard Books, 2001)

Translations

The Swedish-language Moomin picture books were written and illustrated by Tove Jansson.

• The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My [1952] (Sort of Books, 2001) – new verse translation
• Who Will Comfort Toffle? [1960] (Sort of, 2003) – new verse translation
• The Dangerous Journey [1977] (Sort of, 2010) – "new verse translation of the third rhyming tale from Moomin Valley"

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, 1996)
• Leaving and Leaving You, (Carcanet, 1999)
• Love Me Slender: Poems About Love (2000)
• First of the Last Chances, (Carcanet, 2003)
• Selected Poems, 2006
• Pessimism for Beginners, (Carcanet, 2007)

Fiction

• Gripless (1999)
• Cordial and Corrosive: An Unfairy Tale (2000)
• The Superpower of Love (2002)

The Waterhouse and Zailer series

1. Little Face (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)
2. Hurting Distance (Hodder, 2007); also published as The Truth-Teller's Lie (2010)
3. The Point of Rescue (Hodder, 2008); also as The Wrong Mother (2009)
4. The Other Half Lives (Hodder, 2009) also as The Dead Lie Down (2009)
5. A Room Swept White (Hodder, 2010) also as The Cradle in the Grave (2011)
6. Lasting Damage (Hodder, 2011) also as The Other Woman's House (2012)
7. Kind of Cruel (Hodder, 2012)
8. The Carrier (Hodder, 2013)
9. The Telling Error (Hodder, 2014) also as Woman with a Secret (2015)

Hercule Poirot

• The Monogram Murders (2014)

Short story collections

• The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets (2008)
• Something Untoward: Six Tales of Domestic Terror (2012)

Horror

• The Orphan Choir (Hammer, 2013)

External links

• Official website
• Sophie Hannah at British Council: Literature
• Radio interview (2009)
• crimezone.nl; Sophie Hannah at Crimezone (hebban.nl)
• Sophie Hannah at Library of Congress Authorities, with 22 catalogue records