Sophie Hannah was born in Manchester in 1971 and now lives in Cambridge. She was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She has published four previous collections of poetry with Carcanet, a book of poems for children, and six psychological crime novels with Hodder & Stoughton. Sophie has won awards for her short stories and for her poetry. In June 2004 she was chosen for the Next Generation poetry promotion as one of the best twenty poets to emerge in the last ten years.