Holly Jackson was born on 6 December 1992 and grew up in Buckinghamshire, England. She began writing fiction early, completing her first attempt at a novel at fifteen — something she has since described with cheerful self-deprecation. After attending Dr Challoner's High School in Little Chalfont, she went on to the University of Nottingham, graduating with a first-class degree before earning a master's in English with a focus on literary linguistics and creative writing. That background in how language actually works is not incidental to her fiction; her plotting is precise, her misdirections are carefully seeded, and the clues she plants tend to be hiding in plain sight.
Her debut novel, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, was published in 2019 and introduced readers to Pippa Fitz-Amobi, a sharp, determined teenager who reopens a supposedly closed murder case as her school EPQ project. The book became an immediate phenomenon. One of its most distinctive qualities is its format: alongside conventional prose, readers encounter interview transcripts, case notes, maps, and evidence logs, making the experience feel less like reading a thriller and more like working the case alongside Pip. The trilogy was completed with Good Girl, Bad Blood (2020) and As Good as Dead (2021), with the prequel novella Kill Joy also arriving in 2021. The series has sold millions of copies worldwide, and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder won the British Book Awards Children's Fiction Book of the Year in 2020 — one of several accolades the series accumulated.
Jackson's standalone work has demonstrated that her instincts for tension and construction extend well beyond Pip's world. Five Survive (2022) is a claustrophobic, real-time thriller in which six teenagers in a broken-down RV find themselves at the mercy of a sniper demanding a secret worth killing for. The novel plays with pace and confinement in a way that feels deliberately cinematic. The Reappearance of Rachel Price (2024) followed, a standalone thriller centred on a true-crime documentary and questions of who can really be trusted when cameras are rolling.
In July 2025, Jackson made her first foray into adult fiction with Not Quite Dead Yet, published by Michael Joseph in the UK and Ballantine Books in the US. The move into adult suspense marked a natural progression rather than a sharp departure — the darkness, the tightly wound plotting, and the morally complicated protagonists that defined her YA work are all present, but given more room to breathe. The Times named her Britain's bestselling female crime writer in 2024, a distinction that reflects both her sales and the degree to which her readership has grown alongside her.
The television adaptation of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder debuted on BBC Three and Netflix in 2024, with Jackson herself heavily involved throughout production. She has spoken about having a visual, almost cinematic approach to storytelling — constructing each book as though running a film in her head before committing it to the page. Season two of the adaptation is set to premiere in 2026.
Jackson lives in London. Outside writing, she is an enthusiastic gamer, a devoted consumer of true-crime documentaries, and — in a detail that feels very on-brand for someone with a linguistics degree — an inveterate spotter of grammatical errors on street signs.
