When I was five years old I decided I wanted to be a novelist and a zoologist.
Dr Sanjida O’Connell has a PhD in zoology and psychology. She’s the author of eight novels (four written as Sanjida O’Connell – Theory of Mind, Angel Bird, The Priest and the Lily and Sugar Island) and four non-fiction books (Mindreading: How we Learn to Love and Lie; Sugar: The Grass that Changed the World; Chimpanzee: The Making of the Film, and Nature’s Calendar).
She’s also contributed to two encyclopaedias, had poetry published in an anthology and edited two collections of work by students for the charity, First Story. Sanjida has been shortlisted for the BBC Asia Award, the Betty Trask Award for Romantic Fiction, the Daily Telegraph Science Writer’s Award, Asian Woman of the Year, highly commended for BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Award for Nature Writing, long listed for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger and has just won a CWA Short Story Dagger.
Sanjida’s third and fourth novels, The Naked Name of Love (now The Priest and the Lily) and Sugar Island, originally published by John Murray have been republished by Hummingbird Books.
Her first psychological thriller, Bone by Bone, written under the pen name of Sanjida Kay, and published by Corvus Books, went straight into the Amazon kindle best-selling list. It was long listed for the CWA Steel Dagger Award and nominated as one of the best crime and thriller books of 2016 by the Guardian and the Sunday Express. She’s now had three more psychological thrillers published by Corvus Books: The Stolen Child, My Mother’s Secret and One Year Later. The first three psychological thrillers are available as audiobooks. Sanjida has recently contributed short stories to the anthologies, The Beautiful Game in The Perfect Crime, published by HarperCollins, and The Divide, in The Book of Bristol, published by Comma Press. Grave’s Cave, a short thriller, has been broadcast on Radio 4 and her latest short story, Meat, will be published in 2025 in Monster Capital by Comma Press. She’s been a judge for The Bristol Short Story Prize twice, the Royal Television Society Awards, the Wainwright Prize and the Ashdown Forest Poetry Prize.
I’m an award-winning thriller & nature non-fiction writer. I teach writing to people who want to be published.
