Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning to fiction. She is the author of two bestselling books, In Still Water and The Girl on the Train. The international bestseller "The Girl on the Train" sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide and became the basis for the movie of the same name.
Biography and early career
British writer Paula Hawkins was born on August 26, 1972 (today she is 46 years old) in the South African state of Zimbabwe in the family of an economics professor. At the age of seventeen, she moved to the British capital, where she lives to this day. Having entered the University of Oxford, she studied philosophical and political science, plunging headlong into economics. Her education helped her later when she worked as a journalist for The Times, where many issues were covered on the topic of British business. Today, Paula is rightfully ranked among the top 10 best-selling authors in the world, being a laureate of awards in the field of literature: "Livelib Readers' Choice", "The Strand Magazine Critics' Award," The International Thriller Writers' Association (ITW) Award, " Barry."
Paula Hawkins on her bestseller Girl on the Train
Talking about herself, Paula Hawkins spoke about her love of creativity and fantasy. Her home contains dozens of unfinished novels, archived on hard drives - some may be as small as a few pages, and some are tens of thousands of words. Perhaps, says the writer, one day I will even return to some of them.
Shot from the film "The Girl on the Train"
Her best-selling book, The Girl on the Train, portrays alcoholism in a particularly realistic way. How did Paul Hawkins manage to create such a compelling portrait of the disease? Paula says: “We live in a booze-soaked UK culture, so you don't have to go far to experience the chaos that heavy drinking can wreak. You also don't always find alcohol addiction in the most obvious places: there are many successful people who teeter on the edge of the abyss into which the protagonist Rachel slipped. I have read about some of the effects of alcohol consumption: why they occur in some people and not in others, and what exactly happens in the drinker's brain is still unclear. I know that memory loss is often something that affects drinkers, but interestingly, it doesn't necessarily happen in a uniform or predictable way. In some cases, the drinker's memory is restored, in others, it seems that the memory has not been formed at all."
The best in the work of the writer
Paula Hawkins' work was influenced by the works of English and American authors of the psychological and detective genre, especially the likes of Megan Abbott and Gillian Flynn, who intensified the literary novel by touching upon the issues of psychological threat and social anxiety at the end of their pen.
Pen Paula Hawkins saw the light of such wonderful psychological thrillers as "The Girl on the Train" and "In Still Water".
Talking about herself, Paula notes that her taste for the literary image of crime developed in her teens while reading the books of Agatha Christie. But an even greater influence on the formation of her work was the work of the American writer Donna Louise Tartt "The Secret History", which really opened her eyes to the possibilities of a psychological thriller. Today, as Paula herself admits, she reads a lot of crime fiction: she especially likes the series of detective stories about Jackson Brody by Kate Atkinson, who, like Tartt's works, mixes "cracking plots" with a beautiful writing style and exceptionally thoughtful characters. Paula Hawkins is a big fan of policing by Irish writer Tana French, as well as writers such as Harriet Lane, Megan Abbott, and Gillian Flynn. Paula, talking about himself: “Like many authors, I'm in my forties and I borrow pieces of people's personalities and put them into my characters. None of my characters are based on any one person, but they can share traits with people I have ever met in my life."
In conclusion, I would like to say: with the same swift writing and keen understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller Girl on a Train, Paula Hawkins brings deep satisfaction from reading her works, which for her characters depends from the deceitfulness of emotions and memory, as well as the destructive illusions with which the long arms of the past can reach the present. Follow Paula Hawkins on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
