(Web Desk) - Madeleine Wickham, known for writing the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic under her pen name Sophie Kinsella, has died aged 55.
Wickham, dubbed “the queen of romantic comedy” by novelist Jojo Moyes, wrote more than 30 books for adults, children and teenagers, which have sold more than 45m copies.
In April 2024, Wickham announced that she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer, at the end of 2022, and had undergone radiotherapy and chemotherapy after surgery.
Wickham was born in London in 1969. She studied music at New College, Oxford, before switching to Philosophy, Politics and Economics. After graduation, she became a financial journalist, but she said she found the job dull.
During the long commute to central London, she would read paperbacks by the likes of Mary Wesley and Joanna Trollope, and began wanting to write a book.
At 24, she wrote her first novel, The Tennis Party, about a group of friends who take part in a weekend tournament. “My overriding concern was that I didn’t write the autobiographical first novel,” Wickham told the Guardian in 2012. “I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist.
It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, look, I’m not just writing about my life, I’m a real author.”
The Tennis Party was the first of seven novels Wickham wrote under her real name, published yearly between 1995 and 2001, including Cocktails for Three, The Wedding Girl, Sleeping Arrangements and The Gatecrasher. Sleeping Arrangements was adapted as a musical by Chris Burgess.
The Madeleine Wickham books are “rather different” from her later Sophie Kinsella books, said the author. “They’re a bit more serious, a bit darker and are all ensemble pieces without a main heroine, but groups of characters whose lives interlink in some way.”
Wickham also created the children’s book series Mummy Fairy and Me, published between 2018 and 2020. In 2015, she wrote a young adult novel, Finding Audrey, about a teenage girl with social anxiety.
Wickham met her husband, Henry Wickham, on her first night at Oxford University, and married him when she was 21. She is survived by her husband and their five children.