About Me
I write under the names of Melinda Hammond and Sarah Mallory.
I am a member of the Society of Authors and a proud patron of the Lancashire Authors Association.
I have been telling stories for as long as I can remember – many of them born of frustration when I was stuck in a classroom longing to be rescued! I love anything romantic, whether it is a grand opera or a beautiful painting. It doesn’t necessarily have to be happy, as long as it is inspiring.
I was born in Bristol and grew up on Barton Hill, an area of small terraced houses built in the nineteenth century between the mills and the railway. I think my love of adventure stories is due to the fact that I grew up with three older brothers and lived in a street full of boys! My love of history and the English language was fostered at grammar school, where I soon discovered the delights of Georgian and Regency fiction, first of all with the works of Jane Austen and then Georgette Heyer.
I left school at sixteen to work in companies as varied as stockbrokers, marine engineers, biscuit manufacturers and even a quarrying company, but I never lost my love of history, and when I wasn’t reading and researching the Georgian and Regency period I was writing stories about it.
When I was at home with my first child, I decided to try my hand at writing seriously, and my first historical novel, Fortune’s Lady, was published by Robert Hale in 1980. I have now published more than twenty novels, over a dozen of them as Melinda Hammond, winning the Reviewers Choice award in 2005 from Singletitles.com for Dance for a Diamond and the Historical Novel Society’s Editors Choice in 2006 for Gentlemen in Question.
Writing as Sarah Mallory I have published more than 40 historical romances with Harlequin Mills & Boon. The Earl’s Runaway Bride won the coveted CataNetwork Reviewers Choice award in 2010 and I also won the Romantic Novelists’ Association RoNA Rose Award in 2012 and 2013, and the RNA’s Romantic Historical Novel Award in 2024 for The Night She Met the Duke.
After living for many years on the Yorkshire Pennines, taking inspiration from the wild and rugged moors, in 2018 I ran away to Scotland, and now live on the North West Coast, which is proving even more inspiring!
