Sara Collins author page

Sara Collins biography

Sara Collins is a Jamaican-born British novelist, screenwriter, broadcaster, literary critic, and former lawyer. She grew up in Grand Cayman, studied law at the London School of Economics, and worked as a lawyer for 17 years. She later completed a master’s degree in creative writing with distinction at the University of Cambridge, where she received the Michael Holroyd Prize in 2015.

Collins’s debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, was published in the United States by Harper in 2019. Set in Jamaica and London during the early nineteenth century, the historical Gothic novel follows Frannie Langton, a formerly enslaved Jamaican woman who is accused of murdering the English couple for whom she works and attempts to reconstruct the events surrounding their deaths.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton won the 2019 Costa First Novel Award and was shortlisted for a British Book Award. Collins subsequently adapted the novel for television, writing the four-part screen version produced by Drama Republic for ITV. The adaptation premiered on ITVX in 2022.

Alongside her fiction and screenwriting, Collins has worked as a literary critic for publications including The Guardian and The Washington Post and as a broadcaster for BBC Radio 4. She served as a judge for the 2024 Booker Prize.

Her second novel, American Dream, follows Cassandra Johnson, whose past with two powerful figures in the music industry resurfaces when she is asked to return from London to New York following a murder accusation connected to their shared history.