Sarah Smith

Prize-winning, bestselling novelist Sarah Smith was born in Boston, moved away at 3 weeks old to live in places that have included Wisconsin, New Mexico, and New York; she has also lived in Japan, England, and France. She began telling stories at the age of four, re-telling the Japanese legends she had heard from her family's Japanese maid the night before. Her mother's family has lived in the same house since 1880 and parts of it have never been redecorated. When she was growing up, she and her grandmother would start the day by starting a fire in the stove: which included sawing kindling, bringing upstairs two hods of coal, laying the fire, and hovering over it until it was started.

Not surprisingly, her first three novels are set in the Victorian and Edwardian period: THE VANISHED CHILD, THE KNOWLEDGE OF WATER, and A CITIZEN OF THE COUNTRY. Two were named NEW YORK TIMES Notable Books and one a Waterstone's Best Mystery of the Year. They also have made numerous other Best of the Year lists and regional and national bestseller lists, and have been published in 12 languages.

Her newest book returns to the Edwardian period, to Titanic--but with a multicultural difference. In CRIMES AND SURVIVORS, a young married woman discovers that her grandfather, whom she barely knows, may be passing as white. This is 1912, the height of Jim Crow. She has a family, a husband, a son, brothers and sisters. She's experienced prejudice before--and she won't wish it on her family. But she wants to know the truth...

Her first novel for young adults, THE OTHER SIDE OF DARK, is about ghosts, interracial romance, and a secret kept since slavery times. It has won both the Agatha for best YA mystery and the Massachusetts Book Award for best YA book.

The Shakespeare authorship controversy forms the center of her modern standalone novel, CHASING SHAKESPEARES, which Samuel R. Delany has called "the best novel about the Bard since NOTHING LIKE THE SUN." Two young graduate students together find a letter by one W. Shakespeare of Stratford saying he didn't write the plays. Posy Gould, from Harvard, wants the letter to start her career; Joe Roper, from Northeastern, wants to save Shakespeare--and Posy is going to give him only a week to do it. CHASING SHAKESPEARES is being made into a play.

While writing CHASING SHAKESPEARES, Sarah herself found a major document in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, a new long poem by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and the other major Shakespeare claimant. Mark Anderson says of it, "Sarah Smith has effectively added a whole new work to the Shakespeare canon." A NEW SHAKESPEAREAN POEM is published separately with Sarah's introduction and notes.

Sarah has also written science fiction and horror, novels meant to be read on the computer, and several nonfiction books. She lives near Boston with her (multicultural) family.