Sarah Hall is the author to date of six novels and three collections of short stories. In the summer of 2020, she presented a BBC radio 4 documentary called “The Everywoman” in which she described her childhood “literary encounters” with the characters of Ann Burden in

Z for Zachariah

and the bride’s mother in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” as “boundary-breaking” (Hall, 2020, 16:46). Boundary-breaking may serve as an apt description of her work. It sums up the consistent features that run through her fiction.

It first calls for a geographic understanding of the word in connection with the Borderlands of her native region of Cumbria. Thus her novel from 2015, The Wolf Border, starts with the following epigraphic quote elucidating her choice of title: “Susiraja

3019 words

Citation: Walezak, Emilie. "Sarah Hall". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 November 2020; last revised 19 April 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5852, accessed 27 November 2024.]

5852 Sarah Hall 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.