Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough was born in the market town of Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire on the 28th of March 1972. Her father was a career diplomat, so they soon found themselves living in the Middle East, amongst other places, where the lack of television meant that the young Sarah spent most of her spare time reading. From the age of eight, she spent ten years in boarding schools in Britain, before training as a secondary school teacher and teaching at schools in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. She now lives in Milton Keynes, about five miles from where she was born, and is a full-time writer.

Sarah’s first published work was for Leisure Books, an American publisher, for whom she wrote six books, starting with The Hidden in 2004, and running up to Feeding Ground in 2009. None of these are published on this side of the Atlantic, unfortunately. However, she now has a contract with Gollancz for two separate three-book deals. A Matter of Blood, a sort of supernatural crime thriller, is the first book of The Dog-Faced Gods trilogy, and was published in hardcover in March 2010, and in paperback in February 2011. The second book in the series, The Shadow of the Soul, was published in April 2011, and the final book, The Chosen Seed, is due in February 2012. As Sarah Silverwood, under which name she writes for young adults, she has started on the other trilogy, The Nowhere Chronicles, with the first volume, The Double-edged Sword, published in 2010, and the other two, The Traitor's Gate and The London Stone, being published in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Besides these, she has also written two Torchwood tie-in novels, Torchwood: Into The Silence (Random House, London, 2009) and Torchwood: Long Time Dead (Random House, London, 2011). As well as all of this, Sarah has just signed a three book deal with Quercus imprint Jo Fletcher Books, is writing an episode or really-rather-good BBC TV crime series New Tricks for the 2012 season, and has a horror film in production.

Sarah is not short on opinions, and is not afraid to share them, as anyone who reads her on Facebook will know. For instance:

“I’m not really a paranormal romance fan. If something’s dead and it’s walking around, you should be scared of it; you should not want to have sex with it. That’s wrong in too many ways.”

“The digital age has made self-publishing easier—which isn’t such a great thing, because I’m personally of the opinion that if you can’t get paid for your work, you should go away and make it better because it isn’t probably isn’t good enough to be unleashed on readers yet.”

We are very pleased to have her at her first Irish convention, and very much look forward to meeting her.

Bio by Anne M Kletcha