Background

Sarah Pinborough was born on January 1, 1972, in Milton Keynes, England. Her father was a diplomat, and the family lived in Syria until she was eight.

Education

Sarah was first sent to board at Bedford High School. She then attended the West London Institute (now Brunel), where she studied history and English.

Career

Pinborough trained to be a secondary school teacher after a brief marriage, while still writing her novels. She taught for three years at the Lord Grey School before moving onto Lea Manor High School in Luton. Pinborough also taught at Walton High, Milton Keynes Afterwards.

Pinborough has been a full-time writer since 2008, publishing more than 20 novels and several novellas; she has also written for the BBC. Her recent novels include the dystopian love story, The Death House (2015), and a YA horror story, 13 Minutes (2016), which as of this writing is in production with Michael "Fifty Shades" De Luca for Netflix.

Achievements

• Sarah Pinborough is the number one Sunday Times Bestselling and New York Times Bestselling author of the psychological thriller Behind Her Eyes (2017). During her career, she has published more than 20 novels and several novellas and has written for the BBC. Her recent novels include the dystopian love story, The Death House, and a teenage thriller, 13 Minutes which has been bought by Netflix with Josh Schwartz adapting.
  
  Behind Her Eyes has sold to nearly twenty territories so far and was sold at auction to the US in a significant deal to Flatiron, Macmillan. There are discussions ongoing with several movie studios about the film adaptation.
  
  The Language of Dying, which was published in the year 2009, was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and also won the British Fantasy Award in the year 2010. Another novel by the author, Our Man in Sudan was a finalist during the World Fantasy Awards.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Charm

    (The classic Cinderella story is given a sexy contemporary...)

    2013
  • Beauty

    (In a kingdom far, far away, a handsome prince sets out to...)

    2013
  • Poison

    (Once upon a time, in a kingdom far, far away, a handsome ...)

    2013
  • They Say a Girl Died Here Once

    (Seventeen-year-old Anna has a space in her memory of the ...)

    2016
  • Tower Hill

    (When artifacts hidden centuries ago are unearthed in the ...)

    2008
  • A Matter of Blood

    (A gang hit goes wrong, leaving two schoolboys dead, and a...)

    2010
  • 13 Minutes

    (They say you should keep your friends close and your enem...)

    2016
  • The Death House

    (Toby’s life was perfectly normal… until it was unraveled ...)

    2015
  • The Language of Dying

    (A woman sits at her father's bedside, watching the clock ...)

    2009
  • Mayhem

    (Jack the Ripper is making headlines, but another, much mo...)

    2013
  • Tales From the Kingdoms

    (Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty - stories you ...)

    2016
  • Cross Her Heart

    (Lisa lives for her daughter Ava, her job and her best fri...)

    2018
  • Dead to Her

    (Being the second wife can be murder... "Once a cheat, alw...)

    2020

Views

Here is what Sarah says about her average writing routine: "On a normal novel, I would like to get 2,000 to 2,500 words done in a day; I average 10,000 words a week, and then there’s a day for planning. With the historical ones, it’s a lot harder because you have to stop and double-check facts. I’ve written a collaboration with F. Paul Wilson, and when it was my turn to write my chapter, it was so nice to be writing in the modern world, where someone could walk into a café and I knew they could order a latte, and not have to look up "what did restaurants serve in 1897?"

So yeah, I can get 1,500 words done in the morning, go to the gym, write another 500 words, and then muck around with other projects, like film pitches, TV pitches, or then there might be other stuff like online interviews and paperwork and stuff that goes along with writing.

I just always lived in stories in my head. I believed I was a Martian princess until I was 10. I believed I was never going to die, and I’d been adopted and put on Earth because there was a war… and still sometimes, as I get older, I hope for my immortal life on Mars.

I never had a moment of wanting to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress, but writing was just a thing I always did. And then I started to really enjoy it."

Quotations: "You always have to put the clues in there, you want people to get to the end and say, I should have got that, but for them to feel satisfied that they didn’t."

“I’ve created my own genre of female-centric thrillers, which is writing books where you can’t say what they’re about or you’ll give it away. When people are surprised, I’m like, it’s there; you just couldn’t tell what you were looking for. You shouldn’t cheat the reader; that’s my one big thing. They should get to the end and think, Ah! I should have seen that! Which is the important point, because I know that this may well be a Marmite book: You’ll either love it or hate it.”

"I started out as a horror writer, but I wouldn’t necessarily say I was now. There are elements of darkness; but when you look at the fairy tales, they’re dark, but they’re funny. They’ve got humor. Life is dark, isn’t it?"

"Women are always fascinated by each other – especially younger women. We’ve had centuries of conditioning to make us compete with each other and from an early age we’re told that we need to wear make-up and high heels and dye our hair and almost ‘disguise’ ourselves in order to be loved or approved of. Even magazines etc make us feel like we’re not good enough. So, in any situation where two women are in love with the same man they are often obsessive about each other in ways that two men in love with the same woman wouldn’t be. Women are far more fascinated by other women than they are about men! I don’t really care about "messages" in fiction but it’s more an "exploration" of that dynamic."

"I don't think you could write this book without having the ending already figured out, unless you wanted to do a lot of drafts. I am lazy - I'm a planner. I'd rather plan a lot as I go than write ten drafts."

Personality

Here is what Sarah stated in the 2017 interview about her life and challenges that she currently faces: “I’m going to fess up: I’m a 45-year-old single woman and the veteran of many affairs, as has happened with many of my friends. Relationships tend to end these days because another one has started. We like to think that we’re all faithful, blah blah blah, but life is messy,” she says. “What I’ve realized is that when it’s dynamic with a married man, the man becomes almost irrelevant and the women are entirely fascinated by the other woman.”

Interests

• Writers

  John Connolly, Michael Marshall, Lauren Beukes, Sarah Lotz

Connections

co-author:

Francis Paul Wilson

born May 17, 1946, in Jersey City, New Jersey, he is an American author, primarily in the science fiction and horror genres. Among Wilson's best-known characters is the anti-hero Repairman Jack, an urban mercenary introduced in the 1984 New York Times bestseller, The Tomb. Unwilling to start a series character at the time, Wilson refused to write a second Repairman Jack novel until Legacies in 1998. Since then he has written one per year along with side trips into vampire fiction (the retro Midnight Mass), science fiction (Sims), and even a New Age thriller (The Fifth Harmonic).

References

• Author's Sarah Pinborough Official Website