E L James

After 25 years in TV production, incurable romantic and fangirl E L James quit her job to pursue a childhood ambition – writing stories that would capture the hearts of readers. With her first published novel, the provocative and erotic Fifty Shads of Grey, she succeeded. The story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey’s passionate romance smashed sales records across the globe, topping the New York Times bestseller list for 133 consecutive weeks. Together with its sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed it went on to be printed in over 50 languages and sell more than 160 million copies worldwide. James followed these phenomenal successes with the matching trilogy, Grey, Darker and Freed, retelling the tale from Christian’s point of view.

One of Times Magazine’s ‘Most Influential People of the Year’ and Publishers Weekly’s ‘Person of the Year’, E L James was a producer on all three of the Fifty Shades movies, which together made more than a billion dollars at the box office. Fifty Shades Freed won the Goodreads Choice Award 2012 and Fifty Shades of Grey was voted one of the 100 Great Reads by PBS’s The Great American Read in 2018. Darker was longlisted for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award, and James’s romance, The Mister, once more topped bestseller charts around the world. She followed it up in 2023 with the USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling sequel The Missus.

E L James is blessed with two wonderful sons and lives with her husband, the screenwriter and novelist Niall Leonard, and their two beloved dogs in leafy west London.