Sophie Hannah Bio

Sophie Hannah was born in 1971 in Manchester, England.

Her mother is the author Adèle Geras and her father is the political theorist Norman Geras. Growing up in a household where both parents made their living from ideas and language seems to have made fiction feel less like a career aspiration and more like the natural order of things. She attended Beaver Road Primary School in Didsbury and went on to the University of Manchester.

Writing started with poetry, and it started early. Hannah began her literary career as a poet, publishing her first collection, The Hero and the Girl Next Door, in 1995 at the age of twenty-four.

That year she won an Eric Gregory Award for it, and in 1996 she won an Arts Council Award for her second collection, Hotels Like Houses. The poetry drew serious critical attention from the outset. Her fifth collection, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in British poetry. Her work is studied at GCSE, A Level and degree level across the UK, which places her in a very small group of living poets whose output has been formally adopted into the curriculum.

From 1997 to 1999 Hannah 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’s described how she happened to be published as a poet first, writing poetry almost exclusively for around a decade, before Trinity College, Cambridge approached her to be their Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts. That connection to Cambridge has never really ended.

The move from poetry to crime fiction arrived with Hannah’s first novel. Little Face came out in 2006, opening her bestselling Culver Valley Crime series of psychological thrillers featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer. Set in the fictional West Yorkshire town of Spilling, it gave her a vehicle for the kind of crime fiction she was drawn to: stories built around psychological pressure, unreliable accounts, and the way guilt and memory distort what people choose to tell the police. The novels work on the understanding that the most interesting mystery is usually whether someone who confesses is telling the truth, and why a person might claim responsibility for something they may never have done.

The most recent Zailer and Waterhouse novel is The Opposite of Murder, published in 2026. Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer find themselves investigating a murder that was confessed to before the event. Jemma Stelling has an unshakeable alibi: at the moment Marianne Upton was stabbed to death outside her home, Jemma was sitting in a police station confessing to a murderous obsession with Marianne and outlining a plan to kill her in precisely the way she was killed.

If the Culver Valley series established Hannah as a distinctive voice in British crime, the Poirot commission made her famous in a far wider sense. The Monogram Murders was first published in the UK by HarperCollins in September 2014, becoming the first official novel authorised by the Christie estate to feature Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, and his first literary appearance in thirty-eight years. The brief was daunting by any measure: she had to write Poirot as Poirot, his voice, his methods, his particular combination of vanity and precision, while building a plot entirely her own. In the novel, set in 1929 London, Poirot’s quiet supper in a coffee house is interrupted when a terrified young woman confides that she’s about to be murdered, and begs him not to investigate when it happens. Later that night he learns that three guests at the fashionable Bloxham Hotel have been murdered, a cufflink placed in each one’s mouth, and he must connect this to the woman’s warning while the murderer prepares another hotel bedroom for a fourth victim.

The Monogram Murders was a bestseller in more than fifteen countries. She’s since published further Poirot novels, Closed Casket, The Mystery of Three Quarters and The Killings at Kingfisher Hill, all of which were instant Sunday Times Top Ten bestsellers. Her most recent Poirot novel, Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night, was an Amazon UK No. 1 bestseller.

Two novels from the Culver Valley series, The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives, were adapted as the two-part ITV drama series Case Sensitive in 2011 and 2013. It starred Olivia Williams in the lead role of DS Charlie Zailer and Darren Boyd as DC Simon Waterhouse, and its first episode drew 5.4 million viewers.

Hannah’s career is unusually wide for a crime writer. Her murder mystery musical The Mystery of Mr E, co-written with composer Annette Armitage, was adapted into a feature film in 2023 and released on Amazon Prime. She’s also a bestselling poet shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, a self-help writer, creator and host of the podcast How to Hold a Grudge, and the founder of the Dream Author coaching programme for writers.

Her connection to Cambridge now extends well beyond the fellowship years. She helped create a Master’s Degree in Crime and Thriller Writing at the University of Cambridge, for which she’s the main teacher and Course Director. The two-year part-time master’s degree welcomed its first cohort in January 2020. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024. She lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, where she’s an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College.