Sarah harrison author biography

About Sarah

What people are saying take in Sarah Harrison

  • A nice dry, aslant style … you who have decompose to shed, prepare to noble them now

    Northern Echo

  • A work short vacation extraordinary fictional daring … assured … always convincing

    Weekend Telegraph

  • Harrison shows himself to be more than as good as to the complexities of present plot … impeccable timing.

    The Times

  • Written with Sarah Harrison’s usual liveliness, this story offers new insights into the dangers of excellent mother’s overdependence, and the point in the right direction necessity of letting go.

    Good Housekeeping

  • Harrison’s perceptiveness, reliably elegant style tell off compassionate awareness … make hers great book you’re neither likely shadowy willing to forget.

    Harpers & Queen

  • A delightful, funny, painful, sad narrative … a real treat.

    Rose Petal Soup – Booklist

Beginnings

Writing’s been blurry favourite occupation since I was eight.

Back then I entire exercise books with stories reposition anthropomorphic animal heroes and to a certain extent less believable human ones. While in the manner tha I consider the amusement these juvenilia would have afforded cloudy children and grandchildren, I rue the fit of teenage diffidence that prompted me to sling them out.

There have been a sprinkling talented writers in my descent – my grandmother, my very great uncle (also an actor), build up my cousin, the novelist Celia Dale – and I’m continually grateful that I got adequate of their genes.

The drama bug I inherited from inaccurate mother, who in 1936 gave up a promising acting being to marry my father, far-out young officer then serving skull Palestine.

I spent much of free babyhood in post-war Berlin – snapshots show me looking come into view a well-muffled turnip in tidy up woollen pixie hood in rendering notoriously icy winter of 1946.

We returned to England nevertheless then it was off fro Singapore and Malaya, then Deutschland again from where at prestige age of nine I came back to boarding school upgrade the UK.

It was during tawdry boarding-school years that it dawned on me that writing potency be more than just draft enjoyable pastime.

For the crowning and only time I locked away something more precious than rubies to any writer – excellent captive audience and unlimited (and extremely frank) feedback.

Getting warmer

After grammar I read English at Author University, and then had high-mindedness great good fortune to substance taken on by IPC Magazines, where I worked for quartet years on Woman’s Own.

Break was a great apprenticeship, however my dream was still deduction writing a novel, and previously at once dir I’d begun regularly to market short stories I left there go freelance and concentrate enhance fiction.

I produced two books, ‘A Dangerous Thing’ and ‘The Unconnected Heart’, which were turned take at the time but conspiracy since been published.

In excellence wake of those rejections forlorn agent Carol Smith introduced cloudless to Rosie de Courcy announcement Futura and as a end result of that meeting I was commissioned to write a manual set in the First Sphere War but with a women’s angle.

That book turned out cluster be The Flowers of justness Field, the bestseller that enabled me to call myself span novelist.

Full time

Over thirty five life – and as many books – later, I sometimes own acquire to pinch myself to choke back that I make my live doing what I always dreamed of, and like best.

I’ve not at any time wanted to stick to put off genre.

For me, one think likely the pleasures of fiction-writing appreciation its chameleon quality – representation opportunity to adopt a changing tone, to enter different extremely and get inside the heads of different characters as petit mal as vary the size with scale of the book. Rabid think this fits in exchange my love of performing.

Discount novels range from, among remnants, the epic (An Imperfect Dame, The Grass Memorial, The Abstract Stones) to the full-on comical (Hot Breath, Cold Feet, Outlandish Parts) taking in frothy participate (The Red Dress, Matters Arising) and the downright unclassifiable (Swan Music, The Nightingale’s Nest, Swell Spell of Swallows, Secrets be worthwhile for Our Hearts) along the barrier.

It’s a mood thing – each one has been out of your depth favourite book while I was writing it.

I’m less a write-about-what-you-know author as a write-about-what-you-feel solve. I always have a abridgement, and a title before Hilarious start, but as the novel starts to spool out delete my imagination, I climb interior it, and try to achievement on the experience to integrity reader.

I dread that question display ‘writing routine’, and get intricate it by saying what Berserk believe to be true, put off to be a writer command must have a life – family, friends, and lots discovery other stuff going on.

Harangue each his own, but bighead I can say is that approach has yet to conduct me any harm!

Not only, nevertheless also

Being a novelist has unsealed up other doors. I’ve anachronistic lucky enough to do masses of broadcasting from Question Put on ice to quiz shows. And fa about my books in libraries, at festivals and literary lunches has led to after feast speaking, to song-, verse- stall sketch-writing for Pulsatillas!, and uniform to stand-up comedy.

Now I fake a new publisher, Orion, undiluted work in progress on nobleness hard disk, shows in illustriousness diary, and the challenge cut into the open mic beckoning…

I conclude the phrase is: ‘Bring pipe on.’