Sarah Connell

From seven to seventy there is a line, an invisible one that only I can see. From the child who sat in the library, too shy and too unconfident to admit to the questioner that she wanted to be a writer, the line stretches to my seventieth birthday celebration when my debut novel 'Whenever'  was launched. What connects them is the years of a full family and working life, when the notebooks filled up, the drafts were abandoned, ideas dreamed of and lost, and I never admitted out loud that I was always writing.

So here I am about to see the publication of my third novel 'Where Are You Now?'. 

'Whenever' is the story of a woman who wakes up to find her husband has left her in the night. It won the Cinnamon Debut Novel Prize,'a distinctive voice', and was published in 2019. 'Random Three, published a year later, follows a young mother struggling to bring up her little boy alone and the two women who try to help her. 

'Where Are You Now' is the story of a friendship beween two men, one settled, retired, resistant to change and the other a refused asylum seeker on the run from the authorities. Should Walter help Osama once he realises he has lied?

This novel was longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Prize 2021 for women writers of 'literary merit and unputdownability.'

 I write social fiction, with a focus on characters and the setting is my adopted home town in Yorkshire,  Wakefield.