About Sarah
I’m a writer of novels, short fiction and creative non-fiction with a Creative Writing MA from the
University of East Anglia. I was shortlisted for the Curtis Brown Scholarship in 2001.
My first novel, The Needle in the Blood, won the Susan Hill Award in 2007 and was shortlisted for a Romantic Times award. It was excerpted for an edition of Radio 3’s The Verb which featured the UEA Creative Writing MA. My second novel, The Book of Love (published in the US as Sins of the House of Borgia) has been translated into nine languages and was a Toronto Globe and Mail bestseller. A third novel, Erosion, was published in 2014.
My novella, Lines and Shadows, will be published by Story Machine in August 2023.
I have contributed to anthologies and been published in Asian Cha, The Lighthouse Literary Journal, QWF Magazine, MsLexia, Spiked, Solander, The Yellow Room, Unthology and Writing in Education, and have been commissioned to write short fiction for BBC Radio 4. My work has also been performed on Radio 3’s The Verb.
I contribute to the Historical Novels Review, the journal of the Historical Novel Society, which I edited for two years.
I began reading for a PhD in creative and critical writing at the Open University in 2020. The novel I am writing for my PhD is entitled Daughters of Heaven and looks at the contribution of women needleworkers to the hot air balloon craze of the 1780s and the manufacture of spacesuits for the
Apollo astronauts in the late 1960s.
I teach creative writing at third year undergraduate and masters level at the Open University and work as a mentor to fellow novelists through The Literary Consultancy’s Chapter and Verse programme. I also work as a freelance workshop leader, most recently for the National Centre for Writing and Anglia Ruskin University’s A Life Written project, facilitating memoir writing for the over seventies. For ten years I administered the Emerging Literary Translators’ Mentoring Scheme founded by Daniel Hahn in 2010.
I’m a member of the Society of Authors and National Association of Writers in Education.