Chris Manby
Non-fiction writer, Novelist, Memoirist
About
Christine Manby is the author of more than 40 books across multiple genres, writing under her own name and the pseudonyms C. J. Wray, Olivia Darling, Stella Knightley and Stephanie Ash. Her work includes the Sunday Times bestsellers Running Away from Richard, Seven Sunny Days and The Matchbreaker, and has been widely translated; her debut as Olivia Darling, Vintage, was a top-five bestseller in Taiwan.
Together with Jessica Adams and Fiona Walker, she was one of the founding editors of the Girls’ Night In anthologies, which raised more than £1m for War Child. She has taught fiction workshops for the Arvon Foundation and has previously held a Royal Literary Fund writing fellowship at Sheffield Hallam University.
Since 2016 she has specialised in ghost-writing memoir and nonfiction, writing on subjects ranging from sheep-farming to spy-craft. Notable projects include the Times bestseller Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War by Patricia and Jean Owtram (Mirror Books) and War Babies: The Untold Stories of the Silent Generation (Mirror Books), co-written with Simon Robinson. She is especially keen to help bring to publication the stories of people who find it hard to work with modern technology.
Between 2019 and 2022 she wrote a weekly column for the Independent, in addition to features and obituaries. She holds a degree in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University. She is also proud of her WSET Level 3 Award in Wine. When not writing, she enjoys knitting and dressmaking and is learning Italian.