Author Madeleine Wickham was born in London on December 12, 1969. She graduated from New College, Oxford and became a financial journalist. She wrote her first novel, The Tennis Party, at the age of 24 while still working as a journalist. She wrote six more novels as Madeleine Wickham, but no longer writes using her real name. In 1999, she decided to write a novel about a girl with a shopping addiction and decided to write under the pseudonym Sophie Kinsella. The novel, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, became the first in the successful Shopaholic series about Becky Bloomwood, who loves shopping but is not good with money.