In Memory of Madeleine Wickham

December 10, 2025 | News about
• Sophie Kinsella
, and
• Madeleine Wickham

It is with great sadness that we share that our client Madeleine Wickham, best known to millions of readers and fans as Sophie Kinsella, has died after a courageous battle with brain cancer. To champion Sophie Kinsella’s novels was to witness magic—her boundless imagination, her humor, and her profound kindness. I am deeply grateful to have walked beside Maddy on her creative journey, and I will hold her legacy, and the laughter she gave the world, with immense love. — Kimberly Witherspoon

The bestselling novelist Madeleine Wickham, best known to millions of readers and fans as her pseudonym Sophie Kinsella, has died aged fifty-five after a courageous battle with brain cancer.

Madeleine, known to everyone as Maddy, wrote her first novel under her real name aged twenty-four, whilst working as a financial journalist. The Tennis Party was an immediate success, a top ten bestseller hailed by critics and the public alike. She went on to publish six more novels as Madeleine Wickham. Five years later, writing as Sophie Kinsella, she published the groundbreaking The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, which introduced readers to the beloved Becky Bloomwood, a character for our times, funny, feisty and without a trace of guile. Over the next twenty-five years, Maddy would write eight further Shopaholic novels and another eighteen books, including one YA novel and four children’s books. Over the course of her career, she has sold over 50 million copies of her books in over sixty countries and has been translated into forty languages.

While she is known as the ‘queen of happy endings’, Madeleine also defined and elevated romantic comedy by populating her stories with real-life issues that combined wit, emotional depth and societal insight. Her distinctive voice and style brought her readers from a wide demographic across the world. Her most recent book, published in 2024, was the extraordinary novella, What Does It Feel Like?, a poignant and witty account of her cancer journey which was miraculously written after her surgery and which went on to be another instant Sunday Times bestseller.

Araminta Whitley and Marina de Pass, her agents at The Soho Agency, said:

Maddy was a once-in-a-lifetime author and friend, and it has been the privilege of our working lives to represent her since the beginning of her career. Over the last three decades, her success has been truly international: she published thirty-four novels across adult, YA and children’s publishing that have topped charts around the world, breaking records and defying expectations. Yet reaching higher heights wasn’t what drove her.

Maddy was an intelligent, imaginative, loving and irreverent woman who valued the deeply connective power of fiction. She had a rare gift for creating emotionally resonant protagonists and stories that spoke to, and entertained, readers wherever they were in the world and whatever challenges they faced. She also had an unmatched wit and ability to find the funny side. Comedy, for her, was both an art form and an intellectual pursuit and she instinctively understood that it is often a tightrope act of balancing light with dark.

Her readers, and we include ourselves in that, felt seen and understood by her protagonists and their stories. We have lost count of the number of fans we met at events and in signing lines who wanted her to know that her books had helped them through some of the hardest moments of their lives. Yet through it all, Maddy remained humble and full of wonder at her success and influence. Consequently, she was profoundly moved, and buoyed, by the outpouring of love and support she received on publicly disclosing her glioblastoma diagnosis last year.

It is hard to contemplate life and work without Maddy. We will remember her for her warmth, insight and irrepressible sense of humour, for the magnificent, witty and resonant novels she leaves behind, and for making our days infinitely more meaningful and fun. We are completely heartbroken at her death. We loved her dearly and will miss her more than we can say.

Bill Scott-Kerr, Publisher at Transworld, her publishing home for the past thirty years, said:

I have had the true pleasure of knowing Maddy for the past three decades. Transworld have been lucky enough to publish every one of her adult novels. She was our author, our cheerleader, our fellow conspirator and our friend. From the outset it has been a genuine partnership based on commitment, trust and celebration that has gone from strength to strength over the years, right up to the heartbreaking brilliance of her last novella. She has been such an unshakeable pillar of our publishing at Transworld for so many years that the thought of a year without a Sophie Kinsella to publish is inconceivable.

As a writer, Maddy was a complete professional; she consistently delivered above and beyond what she promised. But what really singles her out and made all of her myriad achievements possible was her humanity. First and foremost, she was intensely, authentically herself: intelligent, creative, intuitively understanding and curious about the world and the people who lived in it. Even if you didn’t know her personally, you got such a strong sense of connection with the person behind the books that reading them felt like a communal moment.

Every time you opened one of her novels you knew you were in for something special. It takes exceptional talent to balance pitch-perfect comic timing with serious intent on the page and Maddy was able to do that with apparent ease, time and time again. Her instinctive and empathetic understanding of human nature gave her novels true authenticity that broadened and deepened the experience of reading them, and yet she could still turn on a pin from a farcical scenario to a moment of breathtaking pathos. She gave substance to the fine art of entertainment, elevating it to something that delivered an individual experience to each and every one of her readers, irrespective of gender or age.

Maddy leaves behind a glorious and indelible legacy: a unique voice, an unquenchable spirit, a goodness of intent and a body of work that will continue to inspire us to reach higher and be better, just like so many of her characters. On a personal level Maddy was the embodiment of joy, an extraordinarily clever, funny, sassy, impish, kind and generous collaborator who brought light into our lives. She was as part of this company as anyone, and we will all truly miss her.