Journalistic foundation, Creative punch

“My earliest, most impactful encounter with a book was when I was seven and awoke early on Christmas morning to find Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in my stocking. I had never been so excited by the sight of a book - and have possibly never been since!” – Sophie Kinsella

  

Born on this date in 1969, Madeleine Sophie Wickham writes under the pen name Sophie Kinsella, an English author known for writing under the loosely termed style  “Chick Lit.”    Her fame has grown through her books The Shopaholic Series, led by 2009’s Confessions of a Shopaholic.  Those books have literally taken the world by storm, being translated into more than 30 languages.

  

“When I had the idea for Shopaholic, it was as though a light switched on,” she said.  “I realized I actually wanted to write comedy. No apologies, no trying to be serious, just full-on entertainment. The minute I went with that and threw myself into it, it felt just like writing my first book again - it was really liberating.”

Kinsella started as a financial journalist then branched into creative writing at age 24, publishing her first best-seller in 1995 The Tennis Party (re-released in 2012 as 40 Love) – under the name of Wickham.  Since then, she has churned out 23 novels, the latest Finding Audrey.

 

Glad she started as a journalist, she said journalism                     

 is a good foundation.  “Being a journalist is good if you want to write books: it teaches you to get beyond the blank screen. My books have been described as froth, but there's scope to be witty and ironic about everything in life.”

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