Sofi Kinsella

Sophie Kinsella is the pen name of British writer Madeleine Wickham (née Madeleine Townley).

She graduated from New College, Oxford.

She worked as a teacher and as a financial journalist for the magazine Pensions World, but Madeleine did not find this particularly satisfying. To amuse herself, she read detective novels on her way to work in the morning and at some point decided to try writing a book herself.

During this period, Madeleine, together with her husband, a former opera singer, took part as an accompanist in concert tours of Africa and the Middle East. At the age of 24, she wrote her first novel, Tennis Party, publishing it under her own name with Black Swan. Six more of her novels were later released by that publisher. However, they did not enjoy any particular success with readers. Everything changed after the publication of the first Shopaholic book, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic. The novel was a dazzling success. No wonder, since Madeleine was writing about something familiar to almost every woman and something she knew well herself. Madeleine admits that she is a shopaholic too, like the heroine of her books, Becky. “I have my ‘Becky moments,’ when Becky’s logic predominates in my head. And when I’m writing Shopaholic, I seem to become Becky altogether,” the author said in one interview. The main character, Becky Bloomwood, was largely based on the author’s middle sister, who was very flattered to learn this.

The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic was published by the same house as her previous books, Black Swan. At first, they had no idea that Madeleine Wickham and Sophie Kinsella were one and the same person. They only found out when the author brought them the novel Can You Keep a Secret? To write the second and third books in the Shopaholic series, Shopaholic Abroad and Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Sophie made several trips to New York in order to study Manhattan stores carefully.

Incidentally, her Shopaholic books were translated into Russian first, and only then her other novels. In 2009, the Shop