Jojo Moyes

Pauline Sara Jo Moyes (born 4 August 1969), known professionally as Jojo Moyes, is an English journalist and, since 2002, a romance novelist and screenwriter. She is one of only a few authors to have twice won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists’ Association and has been translated into twenty-eight languages.[1]

Pauline Sara-Jo Moyes was born on 4 August 1969[2] in Maidstone,[3] England.[4]

Before attending university, Moyes held several jobs: she was a typist at NatWest typing statements in braille for blind people, a brochure writer for Club 18-30, and a minicab controller for a brief time. While an undergraduate at Royal Holloway, University of London, Moyes worked for the Egham and Staines News.[5]

Moyes won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper which allowed her to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University in 1992. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1998. In 2002 she became the newspaper’s Arts and Media Correspondent.[6]

Early in her writing career,[7] Moyes wrote three manuscripts that were all initially rejected. With one child, another baby on the way, and a career as a journalist, Moyes committed to herself that if her fourth book was rejected, she would stop her efforts. After submitting the first three chapters of her fourth book to various publishers, six of them began a bidding war for the rights.

Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.[8]

Moyes’ publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, did not take up the 2012 novel Me Before You and Moyes sold it to Penguin. It sold six million copies, went to number one in nine countries, and reinvigorated her back catalogue resulting in three of her novels being on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time.[9][10] Moyes would later write two sequels to Me Before You: After You in 2015 and Still Me in 2018.[11]

In 2013, it was announced that Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter had been hired to write an adaptation of Me Before You.[12] In 2016 the film adaptation Me Before You was released and the screenplay was written by Moyes.[13]

In 2018, Moyes invested £120,000 in the Quick Reads Initiative, an adult literacy project. Her investment gave the program three additional years of funding.[14] Her book, Paris for One and Other Stories, is part of the 2015 Quick Reads collection,[15] and she contributed a short story to A Fresh Start, from the 2020 Quick Reads collection.[16]