Sophie Hannah Books

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Sophie Hannah is a British author and poet that writes crime fiction. She was chosen to take over from Agatha Christie, writing new novels set in the legendary author’s Hercule Poirot world. Hannah was born in Manchester, England to an academic and an author (Norman Geras and Adele Geras respectively).

She attended the University of Manchester, eventually publishing her first volume of poems at 24. Her work was compared to Wendy Cope and Lewis Carroll. She even drew the attention of the Poet Book Society which named her one of their ‘Next Generation Poets’.

Her skill as a poet is such that schools in the country study her poems, not only at University but GCSE and A-Level. Her bibliography is somewhat diverse. Her poems are popular but she has also written for children.

Her renown can be imputed to the many successful crime fiction novels she has written over the course of her career. She cemented her place in the history of the University of Cambridge when she helped them create their Master’s Degree program in Crime and Thriller writing.

Her fiction always starts with a scenario that can’t be explained. Her goal is to engross her readers with a mystery from the very beginning before slowly revealing the various components of her plot. She learned this from Agatha Christie.

Christie wasn’t interested in starting her novels with a dead victim whose murder the protagonist would proceed to solve. Rather, her stories always began with some strange and inexplicable occurrence.

Sophie Hannah took note of Christie’s approach and deployed it in her own writing. Her interest in crime fiction was cemented by Agatha Christie but it wasn’t sparked by her work. Hannah was a child when she discovered Enid Blyton.

She read ‘The Secret Seven‘ and loved it. She was already in her teens when she discovered Christie’s ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’. The author wrote her first novel at the age of 16 but publishers rejected it.

She wrote two more novels but she met the same result. The publishers in question were not impressed by her stories but they thought that her writing was excellent and they told her as much.

Hannah took this as a sign that crime fiction wasn’t her forte. So she turned to poetry. Hannah had been writing poems since childhood. And unlike her crime stories, people appreciated her poems. After university, she intentionally secured a simple secretarial job in the hopes that it would allow her to write.

The author spent the next few years producing poetry. She was quickly rewarded with attention and accolades. Hannah would have abandoned crime fiction altogether if she hadn’t fallen pregnant.

At the age of 31, she had her first child. After five days of labor, Hannah’s child was finally born. After she had rested, she tried to see her baby. But the first child she encountered wasn’t hers. She was eventually reunited with the right infant. But she wondered what would happen if her husband arrived in a few hours and she tried to convince him that they had given her the wrong baby.

The thought amused her. It also became the foundation for ‘Little Face’, her first crime fiction novel. ‘Little Face’ was immensely successful, paving the way for Hannah to finally pursue the career in crime fiction she had always wanted.

Sophie Hannah Awards

Hannah won the Specsavers National Book Award for ‘The Carrier’. She was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award in 2007. The author won the ‘Daphne Du Maurier Festival’ Short Story Competition in 2004.

Sophie Hannah Books into Movies

‘Case Sensitive’, a two-part ITV drama, was an adaptation of ‘The Point of Rescue’ and ‘The Other Half Lives’.

Best Sophie Hannah Books

Hannah has been commended for writing with warmth, humor, and wit, with some of the best books in her bibliography including:

Monogram Murders: Three guests at a London Hotel are dead. The murderer placed a cufflink in each victim’s mouth. Hercule Poirot is fascinated. He can’t help but think that the deaths are connected to a woman who told him earlier in the day that she was about to be murdered.

Little Face: Two weeks after giving birth, Alice left her newborn with her husband. She came back two hours later to find that the baby in the crib was not hers. But no one believes her, not her husband and not Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse.

When Does The Next Sophie Hannah book come out?

The next book by Sophie Hannah is The Opposite of Murder and will be released on January, 16th 2025.

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