Sophie Hannah
Sophie Hannah (born 1971, Manchester, England) is a 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.
In the Agatha Christie universe, she is best known as the author of a number of authorized continuation novels featuring Hercule Poirot. She is has also been interviewed in various documentaries about the life and works of Agatha Christie.
Biography[]
Sophie Hannah's father is 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 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, 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 a two-part drama named "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.
Agatha Christie continuation novels[]
On the 4th of September 2013, it was announced that Hannah would pen a new Agatha Christie novel featuring Hercule Poirot, the first of it's kind and the first new novel to feature Christie's beloved detective in over 38 years. The decision to write the novel was backed by Christie's descendants, and HarperCollins, her publishing company. It was announced in early 2014 that the new novel would be called The Monogram Murders, and would be published in September 2014. The first edition of this novel was published on the ninth of September, 2014, to high critical acclaim. As of 2023, a total of five novels have been published.
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 (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)
- Hurting Distance (Hodder & Stoughton, 2007) also published as The Truth-Teller's Lie (2010)
- The Point of Rescue (Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) also published as The Wrong Mother (2009)
- The Other Half Lives (Hodder & Stoughton, 2009) also published as The Dead Lie Down (2009)
- A Room Swept White (Hodder Stoughton, 2010) also published as The Cradle in the Grave (2011)
- Lasting Damage (Hodder & Stoughton, 2011) also published as The Other Woman's House (2012)
- Kind of Cruel (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012)
- The Carrier (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013)
Agatha Christie contnuation novels[]
- 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)
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