Paula Hawkins

       Paula Hawkins is a British author, commonly known for writing The Girl on the Train. Paula was born in Africa, then moved to London at the age of seventeen. She started working for The Times, as a journalist for fifteen years, and reported on busines. After that, she started writing novels under the name Amy Silver. She didn't become well known from those books and barely sold anything. She became financially unstable after writing four books, and not making any sales, and decided she needed a change. That's when she wrote The Girl on the Train, and was not going to give up on this novel. It is now a best selling novel across America.
       In her novels, her characters are all based off of people in her life in some way, which is where she got all the personalities for her characters. In her book, Girl on the Train, the main character Rachel is a hard core alcoholic. Paula explains that the reason for this is because in the UK, heavy drinking is very popular, and isn't looked at as a bad thing. She made the main character in her novel have a very tragic life. Paula realized she was much better at writing tragedies than romance novels, and was shocked when her novel started getting attention. Her novel the girl on the train was her very last attempt at writing, and was ready to give up if it didn't sell. Luckily, it started selling rapidly, and is soon to be a movie.
      She says she is very fortunate that her book has made it so big, because if it hadn't, she would've given up as a writer, and found a new career. Now that it is going to become a movie, she doesn't know how she feels about all this money coming in to her life. She grew up poor, living in Africa, and then trying to make it on her own at seventeen. She never had a lot of money in her life, so it's definitely a big change for her. She told an interviewee "I want to thank everyone for buying my book. Finally, after all these years of writing crap, people finally liked something of mine."