After 25 years in TV, incurable romantic E L James decided to pursue a childhood ambition - writing stories. Her first published novel, the provocative Fifty Shades of Grey, smashed sales records worldwide, topping the New York Times bestseller list for 133 weeks. Together with its sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, and the companion trilogy Grey, Darker and Freed, it went on to sell more than 160 million copies in over 50 languages.

One of Times magazine's "Most Influential People of the Year" and Publisher's Weekly's "Person of the Year", E L James was a producer on all of the Fifty Shades movies, which together made more than a billion dollars at the box office.

Fifty Shades Freed won the Goodreads Choice Award 2012 and Fifty Shades of Grey was voted one of the 100 Great Reads by PBS's The Great American Read in 2018. Darker was long-listed for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award, and James' romance, The Mister, once more topped bestseller charts around the world. She followed it up in 2023 with the USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling sequel The Missus.

E L James lives with her husband, the screenwriter and novelist Niall Leonard, and their two beloved dogs in leafy west London.