Sarah Rayner

I don’t know if you have noticed, but it starts to become a trend on this blog to write about English or Australian authors. Well, in order to not blow away the trend, I will tell you something about Sarah Rayner.

She lives in Brighton with her husband, Tom and, in the university holidays, her 19-year-old stepson, Sebastian. She was born in London as the eldest daughter of psychoanalyst Eric Rayner and children’s book author/illustrator Mary Rayner. She and her two brothers spent their childhood in Richmond, Surrey, then Sarah became a punk, spiked her hair and went to Leeds University to study English and get chilblains. She returned to London in the late ’80s, flattened her hair and worked as a fashion PR for a bit, before her boss told her she was better at writing than schmoozing clients, suggesting her to become an advertising copywriter.

She took the hint, and after ten years in various London agencies, turned freelance, got some short stories published by Woman’s Own, and for many years combined life as an author and copywriter. Her first two novels, The Other Half (Orion 2001) and Getting Even (2002) were well received on publication, but it was her third novel, One Moment, One Morning (Picador 2010) that made the biggest mark in terms of sales, selling close to 300,000 copies in the UK alone. (Sarah is pictured, right, with the UK Bestseller Award she received for sales of over 250,000.) The last seven years have seen the novel translated into eleven languages and published in China, South America and Eastern Europe, and this success meant Sarah was able to focus on her fiction and non-fiction writing full t

ime.

Sarah’s fourth novel, The Two Week Wait, was published in 2012, and 2013 saw the reworked editions of her first two novels, The Other Half and Getting Even getting published in both the UK and US. Her fifth novel, Another Night, Another Day was published by Picador in 2014. Like The Two Week Wait, it features the Brighton-based characters who readers first met in One Moment, One Morning, but is a complete standalone novel.

© picnicontheshelf, June 8, 2018

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