Sarah Hilary

Sarah Hilary is an English crime novelist known for her Marnie Rome series of novels. Her first novel, Someone Else's Skin, won the won the 2015 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.

Early life and education Hilary was born in Cheshire, England and later moved to the South East to study for a First Class Honours Degree in History of Ideas. Hilary announced on X on June 18, 2022, that she is autistic.

Career Sarah Hilary won the Fish Criminally Short Histories Prize in 2008 for her story, Fall River, in August 1892. In 2012, she was awarded with the Cheshire Prize for Literature.

She was 47 years old when her novel, Someone Else's Skin, was published in 2014 and was a Richard & Judy Book Club pick in the same year. It won the 2015 Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, and in 2016, it was selected as one of the titles for World Book Night in the UK. It was also a Silver Falchion and Macavity Awards finalist in the US.

Her second book, No Other Darkness, published in 2015, was shortlisted for a Barry Award.

Hilary has written about her family history, most notably in "My Mother was Emperor Hirohito's Poster Child" for The Guardian, March 2014. Her mother and grandparents were prisoners of the Japanese in Batu Lintang camp where her grandfather, Stanley George Hill, died in 1945. Hilary wrote about her grandmother's experience in the camp for the Dangerous Women Project in 2017.

She wrote the introduction for Virago's new editions of three books by Patricia Highsmith republished in 2016: The Two Faces of January, This Sweet Sickness, and People Who Knock on the Door. Hilary talks about Highsmith's legacy for today's crime writers in A Gift for Killing, June 2016.

Her seventh novel, Fragile, published on 10 June 2021, is partly inspired by the motives of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

In 2023, she published Black Thorn, a crime novel centred around six deaths at a seaside housing development in Cornwall. It received a positive review from Laura Wilson of The Guardian, who praised Hilary's writing style.