{"id":309262,"date":"2025-12-10T17:34:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T17:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/309262\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T17:34:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T17:34:08","slug":"confessions-of-a-shopaholic-novelist-sophie-kinsella-dies-aged-55-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/309262\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Shopaholic novelist Sophie Kinsella dies aged 55 | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madeleine Wickham, known for writing the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic under her pen name Sophie Kinsella<\/a>, has died aged 55.<\/p>\n

Wickham, dubbed \u201cthe queen of romantic comedy\u201d by novelist Jojo Moyes, wrote more than 30 books for adults, children and teenagers, which have sold more than 45m copies.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

At 24, she wrote her first novel, The Tennis Party, about a group of friends who take part in a weekend tournament. \u201cMy overriding concern was that I didn\u2019t write the autobiographical first novel,\u201d Wickham told the Guardian<\/a> in 2012. \u201cI 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\u2019m not just writing about my life, I\u2019m a real author.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Madeleine Wickham books are \u201crather different\u201d from her later Sophie Kinsella books, said the author. \u201cThey\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isla Fisher in the film adaptation of Confessions of a Shopaholic. Photograph: Robert Zuckerman\/AP<\/p>\n

Wickham submitted her first manuscript written under the name Sophie Kinsella, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, without revealing her identity to her publishers. The book \u2013 issued as Confessions of a Shopaholic in some countries \u2013 was published in 2000 and became the first of 10 instalments in the Shopaholic series. The stories follow Becky Bloomwood, a financial journalist with a spending problem. \u201cI thought, wait a minute, shopping has become the national pastime, and nobody has written about it,\u201d said Wickham. \u201cIt felt very much like an experimental project.\u201d<\/p>\n

The series\u2019 first and second novels \u2013 the latter titled Shopaholic Abroad \u2013 were adapted for film. Confessions of a Shopaholic, directed by PJ Hogan and starring Isla Fisher and Hugh Dancy, was released in 2009.<\/p>\n

Beginning in 2003, Wickham also published standalone novels as Sophie Kinsella. These include Can You Keep a Secret?, The Undomestic Goddess and Remember Me?. Her most recent standalone, published in 2023, is titled The Burnout, which she was inspired to write after experiencing it herself and seeing it \u201caround [her] everywhere\u201d. Protagonist Sasha goes to a Devon beach resort she loved as a child to recuperate from burnout, but finds the once grand hotel now dilapidated, and has to share the beach with the grumpy Finn.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe wonderful response to The Burnout has really buoyed me up during a difficult time,\u201d wrote Wickham in the announcement of her cancer diagnosis. Public messages of support came from Fisher, who played Becky in Confessions of a Shopaholic<\/a>, as well as romance writer Moyes and thriller writer Gillian McAllister.<\/p>\n

Wickham\u2019s novels have often been classified as \u201cchick lit\u201d, owing to the romcom-esque situations her often ditzy heroines find themselves in. Yet Wickham considered the term \u201cchick lit\u201d to mean \u201cthird-person contemporary funny\u201d novels. \u201cYou can be highly intelligent, and also ditzy and klutzy,\u201d said Wickham. \u201cYou can be unable to cook, you can like lipstick. And I think it\u2019s more realistic to represent women having all these facets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wickham also created the children\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Madeleine Wickham, known for writing the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic under her pen name Sophie Kinsella,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-309262","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}