Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah (born 1971) is a British poet and novelist.

Sophie Hannah at Hatchards, London, November 2018

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. 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.

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. 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]

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.^[10]

Works

For young children

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

Translations^[11]

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 collections

• 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)
• Marrying the Ugly Millionaire: New and Collected Poems, (Carcanet, 2015)
• Postcard from a Travel Snob

Fiction

• Gripless (1999)
• Cordial and Corrosive: An Unfairy Tale (2000)
• The Superpower of Love (2002)
• Keep Her Safe (2017)

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) (adapted for the TV Series Case Sensitive starring Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd)
4. The Other Half Lives (Hodder, 2009) also as The Dead Lie Down (2009) (adapted for the TV Series Case Sensitive starring Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd)
5. A Room Swept White (Hodder, 2010) also as The Cradle in the Grave (2011)^[12]
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)
10. Pictures Or It Didn’t Happen (Hodder, 2015) also as The Warning: A Short Story (2015)
11. The Narrow Bed (Hodder, 2016) also as The Next to Die (2019)
12. The Couple at the Table (Hodder, 2022)

Hercule Poirot

• The Monogram Murders (2014)
• Closed Casket (2016)
• The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
• The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
• Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)

Short story collections

• The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets (2008)
• Something Untoward: Six Tales of Domestic Terror (2012)
• The Visitors Book (2015)

Novels

• The Orphan Choir (Hammer, 2013)
• A Game for All the Family (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015)
• Did You See Melody? (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017) also as Keep Her Safe (2017)
• Haven't They Grown (Hodder & Stoughton, 2019) also known as Perfect Little Children (2019)

Non-fiction

• How to Hold a Grudge (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018)
• Happiness, a Mystery: And 66 Attempts to Solve It (Wellcome Collection, 2020)

References

1. . The British Council. Archived from the original on 1 September 2003. Retrieved 7 March 2010.
2. [1] 5 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine
3. Lasting Damage (Culver Valley Crime): Amazon.co.uk: Sophie Hannah: 9780340980651: Books. Amazon.co.uk. 17 February 2011. ISBN 9780340980651. Retrieved 14 March 2015.
4. [2] 4 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine
5. Jaques, Liz. . mediatel.co.uk. Archived from the original on 6 May 2011.
6. "Sophie Hannah | Official Author Site". sophiehannah.com.
7. Hannah, Sophie (23 March 2018). "Money in the Morgue by Ngaio Marsh and Stella Duffy review – Inspector Alleyn returns". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 October 2019.
8. Cocozza, Paula (14 October 2019). "'You burned my bagel!': how to let go of a workplace grudge". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 October 2019.
9. "2023 Dagger Award Winners Announced". The Crime Writers’ Association. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
10. . sophiehannah.com. 13 April 2017. Archived from the original on 15 August 2020. Retrieved 2 June 2019.
11. "For Children" 19 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Sophie Hannah. Retrieved 16 March 2015.
12. "A Room Swept White (Culver Valley Crime, book 5) by Sophie Hannah". Fantasticfiction.co.uk. Retrieved 14 March 2015.

External links

• Official website
• Sophie Hannah at British Council: Literature
• Radio interview^{[permanent dead link]} (2009)
• ; Sophie Hannah at Crimezone (hebban.nl)
• Sophie Hannah at Library of Congress, with 22 library catalogue records
• Archival material at Leeds University Library