Frances Hill was born in London in 1943 and studied at Keele University, Staffordshire, where she obtained a BA Honours degree in English Literature and Philosophy. After travelling in Europe and the U.S. she worked as assistant to the blind journalist T.E.Utley, a leader writer and later deputy editor on The Daily Telegraph, in London's Fleet Street. She then worked as a journalist for the London Times Educational Supplement, writing about education and social work issues and editing the Resources pages, on new teaching aids.
In 1973 Frances moved to New York as the American correspondent for the TES. On returning to the UK in 1975 she worked for many years as the radio critic for the TES as well as a fiction reviewer and obituary writer for The Times. She also contributed features to other publications including The Times Higher Education Supplement, The Guardian and The Spectator.
Frances’s first novel Out of Bounds was published by John Murray in 1985 and followed by a second, A Fatal Delusion (John Murray), in 1989.
In 1992 Frances began work on her acclaimed account of the Salem witch trials, A Delusion of Satan, which was published by Doubleday in New York in 1995 and Hamish Hamilton in London in 1996. The paperback was brought out in England by Penguin in 1996 and in the US by da Capo in 1997. A new edition with a new preface appeared in 2002.
Frances’s second book on the Salem witch trials, The Salem Witch Trials Reader, was published by da Capo in 2000 and her third, Hunting for Witches, A Visitor’s Guide to the Salem Witch Trials, by Commonwealth Editions in 2002. The fourth, Such Men Are Dangerous, The Fanatics of 1692 and 2004, showing parallels between the leaders of the Salem witch hunt and those of the Iraq war, was brought out by Upper Access in March 2004.
Frances’s novel about the witch trials, Deliverance from Evil, was published in 2011 by Overlook Press in the US and Duckworth in the UK. Hunting for the Witches: The Second Edition appeared from Applewood Books in 2019. Also in 2019 Frances appeared as a talking head in the four episodes of the Travel Channel mini-series Witches of Salem, broadcast in October in the US and Canada.
Frances Hill lives in London but visits the U.S. regularly, spending every summer in Connecticut.
