Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall is a British novelist and short story writer widely regarded as one of the finest prose stylists of her generation. Born in Carlisle, Cumbria, in 1974, she studied at Aberystwyth University and St Andrews University, earning an MLitt in Creative Writing. She continues to live in her native Cumbria, and the landscape of northern England — its fells, lakes, and weather — runs through nearly all her work. Hall's novels include Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Carhullan Army (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), How to Paint a Dead Man, The Wolf Border, and Burntcoat. She is the only person to have won the BBC National Short Story Award twice, and her story collections Madame Zero and Sudden Traveller have been widely acclaimed. Burntcoat, set during a pandemic, follows a sculptor reflecting on love, art, and mortality. Her prose is celebrated for its sensory richness, its precision, and its ability to render landscape and the body with equal vividness. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers literary fiction of extraordinary beauty and intensity, rooted in the physical world and alive to the currents of desire, grief, and wonder that move through it.