Sarah Hall (writer)
Sarah Hall FRSL is an English novelist and short story writer. Her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was nominated for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. She lives in Cumbria.
Biography
Hall was born in Carlisle, Cumbria. She obtained a degree in English and Art History from Aberystwyth University before taking an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews, where she briefly taught on the undergraduate Creative Writing programme. She still teaches creative writing, regularly giving courses for the Arvon Foundation. She began her writing career as a poet, publishing poems in various literary magazines.Her debut novel, Haweswater, is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-farmers due to the building of Haweswater Reservoir. It won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, set in early twentieth-century Morecambe Bay and Coney Island, is the biography of a fictional tattoo artist. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, and she was again nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2005. In France, it was shortlisted for the Prix Femina étranger 2004.
Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and it was shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award. In America, the novel was published under the title Daughters of the North.
Her 2009 novel How to Paint a Dead Man was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Hall was selected as a residential fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She later served as a juror for the foundation, awarding subsequent fellowships.
In 2013, she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young British novelists. In October 2013, she won the BBC National Short Story Award for "Mrs Fox". She won for a second time in 2020 for her story "The Grotesques".
In 2016, Hall was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2024, she was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Lancaster University, for outstanding contribution to literature. She was appointed as a Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University in March 2025.
In 2017, Hall served on the panel of judges for the Man Booker Prize.
All her novels are published by Faber & Faber. In June 2025, Faber announced that Hall's forthcoming novel, Helm, would be the first to include a 'Human Written' stamp to certify that it had no AI-generated content. Hall devised the mark and her American publisher, Mariner Books, will also use it.
Hall is a patron of Humanists UK. She has lived both in the United Kingdom and in the United States, but as of July 2025, she lives in Kendal.