Sarah Pinborough

Sarah Pinborough was born in Buckinghamshire in 1972, though she spent little of her childhood there. Her father was a diplomat, and those early years took her across Syria, India, Sudan, and Russia before, aged eight, she was sent back to England for a decade at boarding school. That itinerant upbringing, full of unfamiliar places and shifting social landscapes, left a mark on her writing: the sense that the world just beneath the surface is stranger and more dangerous than it looks runs through almost everything she has published.

After boarding school she tried various careers before training as a secondary school teacher. She taught for six years, writing alongside the day job, before fiction finally took over. Her first published work was a short horror story in 2001, and her debut novel, The Hidden, appeared in 2004. Six early novels followed through Leisure Books, establishing her as a writer with serious horror credentials before she began pushing into other territory.

That genre restlessness became one of the defining features of her career. The Dog-Faced Gods trilogy, published between 2010 and 2012 and later released in the United States as the Forgotten Gods series, planted a hard-boiled detective named Cass Jones into a near-future London where something genuinely supernatural is unravelling beneath the city's ordinary corruption. The books combine police procedural grit with mythological unease, and they remain among the most distinctive work she has produced. Around the same time, writing as Sarah Silverwood, she published the Nowhere Chronicles, a young adult urban fantasy trilogy set across parallel versions of London.

She has also worked in shorter forms with considerable success. Her novella The Language of Dying, a quiet and harrowing study of grief, was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 2010. A short story, Do You See?, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 2009, and the novella Beauty took the same Novella award in 2014. Those wins came alongside four British Fantasy Award nominations for Best Novel, and a shortlisting for the British Book Awards.

The Tales from the Kingdoms series offered something different again: adult fairy tale retellings that play with familiar archetypes, including Poison, Charm, and Beauty, finding the darkness that was always present in those stories before modern versions softened it out.

Behind Her Eyes, published in 2017, was the novel that shifted the scale of her readership entirely. A psychological thriller that refused to sit comfortably inside any single genre, it became a Sunday Times number one bestseller and a New York Times bestseller, selling into more than thirty territories worldwide. The Netflix limited series adaptation, released in February 2021, introduced the story to an even larger global audience. Cross Her Heart, 13 Minutes, Dead to Her, and Insomnia followed, each demonstrating her consistent interest in women under pressure, hidden identities, and the gap between a life as it appears and as it actually is.

Alongside her novels, Pinborough has worked extensively in television. She wrote for the BBC, contributed an episode to the long-running crime drama New Tricks, and has had multiple projects in development. In December 2023, it was announced that she would adapt the Dog-Faced Gods trilogy for television through Red Planet Pictures. Her novel Insomnia was adapted for Paramount+, starring Vicky McClure.

With more than thirty books published across horror, fantasy, psychological thriller, and young adult fiction, and with a new novel, They Say a Girl Died Here, due in August 2026, Pinborough is one of the most prolific and genre-spanning writers working in British fiction today. The through-line connecting all that variety is a particular interest in unreliable surfaces: marriages, friendships, and identities that are exactly not what they seem.