Jojo Moyes is an English novelist, journalist and screenwriter, born in Maidstone, Kent, on 4 August 1969. She is best known for “Me Before You” (2012) and its two sequels, and is one of the few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice.
Before university she worked as a typist producing braille statements at NatWest, wrote brochures for Club 18-30 and was briefly a minicab controller. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, and in 1992 won a bursary funded by The Independent to take the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University. She then spent ten years at The Independent, apart from a year in Hong Kong on the South China Morning Post, becoming assistant news editor in 1998 and arts and media correspondent in 2002.
Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when “Sheltering Rain” was published. “Foreign Fruit” won her first Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2004, and “The Last Letter from Your Lover” won the second in 2011. That novel was filmed for Netflix in 2021, and “The Horse Dancer” became a German television film in 2020.
Her publisher Hodder & Stoughton did not take up “Me Before You”, so she sold it to Penguin. First published in the United Kingdom in January 2012, it has sold over 15 million copies according to her website. Moyes wrote the screenplay for the 2016 film, directed by Thea Sharrock and starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin. She continued the story in “After You” (2015) and “Still Me” (2018). “The Girl You Left Behind” (2012) has a companion novella, “Honeymoon in Paris”.
“The Giver of Stars” (2019) is a historical novel about the packhorse librarians of Depression-era Kentucky. It was followed by “Someone Else’s Shoes” (2023) and “We All Live Here” (2025). Her website states that her novels have been translated into 46 languages and have sold over 60 million copies. Penguin lists her next novel, “Three Sisters”, for publication in February 2027. She lives in London.
Publication Order of Me Before You Books
| Me Before You | 2012 |
| After You | 2015 |
| Still Me | 2018 |
Publication Order of The Girl You Left Behind Books
| Honeymoon in Paris | 2012 |
| The Girl You Left Behind | 2012 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Sheltering Rain / Return to Ireland | 2002 |
| Foreign Fruit / Windfallen | 2003 |
| The Peacock Emporium | 2004 |
| The Ship of Brides | 2005 |
| Silver Bay | 2007 |
| Night Music | 2008 |
| The Horse Dancer | 2009 |
| The Last Letter from Your Lover | 2010 |
| The One Plus One / One Plus One | 2014 |
| The Giver of Stars | 2019 |
| Someone Else’s Shoes | 2023 |
| We All Live Here | 2025 |
| Three Sisters | 2027 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Paris for One | 2015 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Paris for One and Other Stories | 2016 |
Photo: Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).