Alice Oseman

Alice Oseman (born 1994 in Chatham, Kent) is a British writer, screenwriter and illustrator of young adult fiction. She is best known for the graphic novel series Heartstopper. Her books capture contemporary teenage life in the UK, and LGBTQ+ characters sit at the heart of much of her work.

Oseman grew up in a village near Rochester, Kent, and graduated in English Literature from Durham University in 2016. She landed her first publishing deal while still a teenager, and in 2014 she published Solitaire, a novel about a gloomy teenager who teams up with an unshakeable optimist to unmask the person behind a run of pranks at their school. Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson appear in it, and they would later become the focus of her best-known project.

Her later novels deal with academic pressure, mental health, friendship and LGBTQ+ relationships in a realistic register. Radio Silence (2016) follows a high-achieving student whose world revolves around university admission. I Was Born for This (2018) looks at fan culture and the pressures on those who become the centre of attention. Loveless (2020) follows a student who is discovering that she is asexual and aromantic.

Heartstopper began as a webcomic in 2016 and was later collected in printed volumes. It is softer in tone than Solitaire and concentrates on the romance between Charlie and Nick. Its success led to a Netflix television series that premiered in 2022, for which Oseman wrote the script and also makes a brief appearance.

Her work has been praised for its realism and its portrait of adolescence, and it has won awards including the Silver Inky. In 2023 the BBC named her among its 100 most influential women. Her legacy lies in giving young readers queer stories they can recognise themselves in, without identity being the only subject.