Short biography.
Stephanie Benson was born in Northern London in 1959, her mother was a school teacher and her father worked for London Transport. Both were avid readers.
My childhood developed under the gaze of Tolkien, Dickens, Du Maurier and Peake, I got through my teenage years thanks to Lawrence, Keats, Eliot and Orwell… After A levels in languages and literature, she studied psychology and Russianat Keele University, then left for France in 1981. Working as a social worker, she began to write novels, and the language issue had to be resolved. My French was far from perfect, but at the same time, writing in English while I was living thousands of kilometres and millions of light years from my origins seemed somehow impossible.
Atalante editions published her first novel A Bat in the Attic in 1995. In 1997 she won the Michel Lebrun prize from the city of Le Mans for her third novel Wolf in a Blue Moon. She was awarded the Polar prize by Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in 1998 for The Adoration of the Shepherds, the second book of the Lord of the Lambs series. In 1999 she won the best crime fiction novel prize from Montigny-lès-Cormeilles for Night Over Liverpool, first of the series Synchronicity. At the same time, she started writing crime fiction for children with Night Train for Syros editions, and won the 1999 Sept Tours d’Or prize for The Mystery of the Spider’s Web with Albin Michel editions. In 2000 she created the series EPICUR for Seuil editions, translated into five different languages, and created the first green crime fiction story with the heroine Lucy Van Garret investigating crime where the victim is the planet earth.
She has also written noir, fantasy and science fiction short stories for anthologies, newspapers and magazines, poetry to accompany work of photographers, theatre pieces shown in different European countries and radio drama for French radios broadcast worldwide. In 2005 she co-authored the French TV series Mafiosa for Canal Plus, broadcast in November 2006. In 2008 she became a professeur agrégée in English, and successfully completed a PhD at Bordeaux University in 2011.
Stephanie Benson is considered to be one of the most prominent French noir writers of the new generation.