Sophie Kinsella death: Confessions of a Shopaholic author dies, aged 55
The bestselling author was best known for her ‘Shopaholic’ novels, which were adapted into a hit film starring Isla Fisher
The author Sophie Kinsella has died aged 55, her family have said.
Kinsella, best known for her bestselling Shopaholic novels, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, in 2022. She revealed the news to the public last year.
A statement posted to her Instagram account said: “We are heartbroken to announce the passing this morning of our beloved Sophie (aka Maddy, aka Mummy). She died peacefully, with her final days filled with her true loves: family and music and warmth and Christmas and joy.
“We can’t imagine what life will be like without her radiance and love of life.
“Despite her illness, which she bore with unimaginable courage, Sophie counted herself truly blessed – to have such wonderful family and friends, and to have had the extraordinary success of her writing career. She took nothing for granted and was forever grateful for the love she received.
“She will be missed so much our hearts are breaking.”
Her books have sold around 45 million copies in more than 60 countries, and have been translated into more than 40 languages and adapted for film and theatre.
Born Madeleine Sophie Townley in 1969, Kinsella grew up in London and studied politics, philosophy and economics at New College, Oxford, before working as a financial journalist. Inspired by authors like Mary Wesley and Joanna Trollope, she wrote her first novel, The Tennis Party, over the course of a few months when she was 24 years old (to get to grips with how a story should be structured, she “took a Jilly Cooper novel and broke it down chapter by chapter, noting what happened in each, to see how she did it”, she later told Woman & Home).
She later admitted that she had felt determined to be taken seriously as a “real author”, so she’d focused on darker subject matter and characters with very different experiences from her own.
It was published two years later in 1995 using her married name, Madeleine Wickham (she’d tied the knot with Harry Wickham, a teacher, in 1991; they had met on her first night as a student at Oxford).
She would go on to write six more books under her real name, releasing one every year until 2001. But towards the end of her twenties, she decided to start working on a novel that would take her career in a very different direction.
“I thought, OK, now without being defensive, I will write a silly book about things I know, and just make it funny and ridiculous,” she told The Guardian. “And if it fails, that’s OK.”
That book was The Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, which told the story of Becky Bloomwood, a twentysomething financial journalist who happens to be dreadful with money, preferring the dopamine rush of putting a new pair of shoes on her credit card to saving up sensibly. This change of genre required a new authorial alter ego: she came up with Sophie Kinsella by combining her middle name with her mother’s maiden name.
After initially submitting it to her publishers under this new identity, the first Shopaholic book debuted in 2000. It was an immediate hit, and two sequels followed over the next two years. Kinsella would eventually write 10 Shopaholic novels in total, following Becky through marriage, motherhood and her various misadventures in spending. Confessions of a Shopaholic, a film adaptation of the first two books starring Isla Fisher as Becky and Hugh Dancy as her love interest Luke, was released in 2009.
Kinsella also wrote a dozen standalone titles, including Can You Keep a Secret? (2003) and The Burnout (2023), and branched out into young adult fiction in 2015 with the release of Finding Audrey. Her work was often branded as “chick lit”, although she preferred it to be classified as contemporary fiction or “wit lit”.
“When I hear the term ‘chick lit’, I feel a pinprick of, not annoyance but of slight resignation,” she told the Daily Mail in 2018. “‘Oh, this again…’ I’ve never had anyone say to my face, ‘Your books are inferior,’ but if people say, ‘Your books are beach reads,’ I say, ‘Yep, that’s fine by me. Read them on the beach!’”
In April last year, Kinsella revealed that she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma towards the end of 2022. “I’ve wanted for a long time to share with you a health update and I’ve been waiting for the strength to do so,” she wrote in a statement posted on her social media accounts, explaining that she had delayed making the news public “because I wanted to make sure that my children were able to hear and process the news in privacy and adapt for our ‘new normal’”.
She told her fans that she had been undergoing treatment at a London hospital, and thanked her family, friends and “the wonderful doctors and nurses who have treated me” for their support.
She is survived by her husband, Henry, and their five children.
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