Sarah Williams

Sarah Williams has been a professional writer all her life. Her crime-writing book are listed below. You can also follow her articles on WORDS & WRITING on Substack.

Crime writing: Sarah has just published (August 2025) the second edition of her How To Write Crime Fiction, which draws on exemplars of excellent writing in a wide variety of genres of crime fiction and true crime to look at how those authors write, and how beginning writers can learn from them to develop their own craft.

She is also currently engaged in writing a historical stand-alone set in the First World War and the first in a historical series set in Victorian England.

Biography: Sarah was born in New Zealand, but has lived in England almost all her life. She was educated at the Lycée Charles de Gaulle in London, and then at Sussex and Oxford Universities. She has worked in book publishing, university teaching, school teaching, and as a book coach. She founded and ran a crime-writing course, Thriller School, and edited an online crime-writing magazine, Crime Fiction Fix. She now works full-time as a writer of crime fiction and non-fiction books on crime writing.

Writing background: Sarah began her writing life by translating books on history, the history of ideas, politics, and sociology. She then moved into both translating and writing information books for children. Subsequently Sarah went on to write textbooks for secondary school English teaching and to edit outstanding pre-twentieth writers such Conan Doyle or Mark Twain for school editions. All in all she has published over 80 non-fiction titles. It was only after all this that she turned to crime.