The author
A life
in stories
Raised in a strictly conservative working-class household where reading was frowned upon, Petra Hammesfahr began telling stories at the age of four. At forty, her first short story, “Sally’s Guardian Angel,” appeared in Playboy. It was her breakthrough. A biography says she gives no account of the thirty-six years in between: “That is where the author finds the material for her thrillers.”
Further short stories and paperbacks followed. In 1991, Das Geheimnis der Puppe became her first novel to appear in hardcover.
Hammesfahr also draws on personal experience. At seventeen she married an alcoholic, spent a period living beneath the roof of her fanatically religious mother-in-law and, at eighteen, borrowed her first psychology books from the village doctor so that she might learn to understand the “poor people” around her.
Today she is acclaimed for the psychological intensity, claustrophobic atmosphere and complex portrayal of obsession in works translated into twenty-three languages.
Four novels have received literary awards and seven have been adapted for the screen. The best-known international adaptation is Die Sünderin, produced in 2017 as the acclaimed US series The Sinner, starring Jessica Biel and Bill Pullman.