Obituary Author Sophie Kinsella’s first aim was to make people laugh

Madeleine Wickham (right), the British author who wrote the Confessions Of A Shopaholic novel series (2000 to 2019) under the pen name Sophie Kinsella, becoming an international sensation, died on Dec 10 at her home in Dorset, England.

- Sopan Deb

She was 55.Her family announced her death in a post on her Instagram page.

Wickham had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, in 2022. She announced the diagnosis in a social media post in April 2024.

She became a force in commercial fiction upon the release of The Secret Dreamworld Of A Shopaholic (released as Confessions Of A Shopaholic in the United States) in 2000. The book introduced readers to the series hero, Rebecca Bloomwood, a financial journalist with an uncontrollable and comedic weakness for retail consumption.

The idea for the first Shopaholic novel came in 1999, when Wickham was stunned by a credit card bill she received in the mail.

"My first thought was, 'I don't remember buying this or that, therefore I must have been defrauded,'" she told The Times Colonist, a news outlet in Canada, in 2007. "I suddenly saw the potential of shopping as a story to write about."

She adopted the pen name Sophie Kinsella for what she believed would be a one-off project. "I thought, if it's a complete flop, then it will have nothing whatsoever to do with me," she told The Toronto Star in 2014.