Paula Hawkins Biography

Paula Hawkins is the author of the bestselling thriller novel The Girl on the Train.

Hawkins was born and raised in Zimbabwe, but has been a resident of London since 1989, when she moved there with her parents at the age of 17. A graduate of Keble College, she began her career in the mid-1990s as a financial journalist for The Times of London.

She was with The Times until 2004, then worked as a freelance journalist until 2009, when she began writing novels on commission for an imprint of Random House.

Under the pseudonym Amy Silver, Hawkins wrote four “chick lit” novels, published between 2009 and 2013. By her own account, her stories became too dark for the genre, so she decided to write a thriller.

The result was The Girl on the Train, one of the best selling novels of 2015. The story of an unreliable narrator who may have witnessed a crime, the novel drew comparisons to Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl, and a film version starring Emily Blunt was released in 2016.

Hawkins published a second novel, Into the Water, in 2017.