Sally Emerson is an English novelist, anthologist and travel writer.
Emerson was educated at Wimbledon High School and St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her mother worked in Hut 6 in Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to break the Enigma code.
Between school and university Emerson was editorial assistant and writer on the magazine Books and Bookmen which she later went on to edit.
While at Oxford she edited Isis,[1] won the Vogue Talent Contest for writing in 1972 and the Radio Times Young Journalist of the Year competition along with a Catherine Pakenham Award and wrote for The Times.
She worked on The Illustrated London News then became assistant editor of Plays and Players in 1976. From 1978-1985 she was editor of the literary magazine Books and Bookmen (which briefly became Book Choice then returned to the title Books and Bookmen).[2]
In 1980 she published her first novel Second Sight. It won a Yorkshire Post Best First Novel award. In the US the title was The Second Sight of Jennifer Hamilton. Next came Listeners in 1983, the bestsellers Fire Child (1987), Separation (titled Hush Little Baby in the US) 1992 and Heat set in Washington DC in 1998. Broken Bodies came out in 2001 and her collection of short stories Perfect: Stories of the Impossible. [3] [4] in 2022.
Her anthologies, collections of poetry and prose on birth, love and death are In Loving Memory: A Collection for Memorial Services, Funerals and Just Getting By (2004),[5] Be Mine: An Anthology for Lovers, Weddings and Ever After (2007) and New Life, An Anthology for Parenthood (2009).
Her other non-fiction anthology titles include A Celebration of Babies (1986), The Kingfisher Nursery Treasury (1988),
Since 2003 she has also worked as a travel writer for the Sunday Times[6] as well as contributing to other newspapers. She has co-written the musical Prohibition (2023) and written screenplays.
Her six earlier novels were republished by Quartet Books as Rediscovered Classics in 2017, and in 2021 by Quadrant Books.
In the early 1980s, while transiently separated from her husband while he was involved with someone else, she had an affair with writer Douglas Adams. She was married to Peter Stothard from 1980 to 2021 and they have two children, the novelist Anna Stothard and Michael Stothard, born 1983 and 1987, and six grandchildren.