About S.L. Russell
S.L. Russell has been making up stories since childhood but began writing seriously around twenty years ago. Since then, she has published a growing collection of contemporary novels, including The Thorn of Truth, The Healing Knife, A Vision of Locusts, and The Wounds of Time. Her books are known for their emotional depth, relatable characters, and themes of faith, resilience, and identity. Readers have called her an author whose work resonates with honesty and heart, whose fiction is “full of intrigue, suspense, emotion and truth.”
Her stories are inspired by real life—ordinary people navigating the extraordinary challenges of relationships, loss, moral conflict, and self-discovery. Always written from a Christian worldview, her books aim to honour God without being preachy or pious. They're about recognisable lives: full of delights, disasters, dilemmas and grace.
Before writing full-time, S.L. Russell had a varied career: she taught children with special needs, taught English to adults in the Far East, played the piano in a ballet school, and worked for seventeen years as a Samaritan. These experiences inform her compassionate, grounded storytelling.
She has a degree in history and lives in the south of England with her husband. She sings in a choir, plays flute in a band, and plays the organ in her local church.
Her latest novel, The Art of Life, tells the story of Fen Bailey, a woman trying to rediscover her creative self in the Yorkshire Dales. But just as she begins to find freedom, devastating news from home challenges everything she’s built. It’s a heartfelt exploration of identity, sacrifice, and what it truly means to live.