Penny Batchelor writes domestic noir thrillers with secrets, lies and lots of twists! Her debut My Perfect Sister was longlisted for The Guardian‘s Not The Booker Prize 2020 and her second, Her New Best Friend, was published on 5th August 2021 and has received great reviews, with LoveReading UK describing it as ‘a white-jncikle tense thriller that as more twists than a Simone Biles gymnastics routine’ and Penny herself as ‘the Tsarina of twists’. She is now signed to Embla Books. Her third psychological thriller is due to be published in June 2024.

She is an alumna of the Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course, a freelance journalist and a monthly columnist for The Bookseller.

Disabled herself, Penny is passionate about positive disability representation in fiction. One fifth of the UK population is disabled, so why don’t we see that reflected in novels? That’s the reason that, along with publisher Clare Christian and with the support of the Society of Authors, she co-founded the ADCI Literary Prize for adult fiction written by a disabled and/or chronically ill writer that contains one or more disabled characters.