Owen Nicholls Books in Order

Owen Nicholls is a British novelist and screenwriter whose romantic fiction is shaped by the habits of a lifelong film fan. He lives in Norwich, England, with his family, and his books bring a screenwriter’s sense of scenes, timing, and missed cues to modern love stories.

Before publishing fiction, Nicholls built experience around the world he loved watching. He worked as a film journalist, wrote about film, television, and music for Empire and NME, and worked as a script reader. He has also worked at the Toronto International Film Festival, an experience that kept him close to the business side of storytelling.

He studied screenwriting at the University of East Anglia, earning a master’s degree. One of his early screenplays was a biopic about filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which was optioned for development.

The route to fiction wasn't a straight line.

Nicholls's first novel, Love, Unscripted, arrived in the UK in 2019, then in North America in 2020. The book follows Nick Marcet, a London film projectionist who has treated romantic movies as a guide to life. When Ellie leaves him, Nick looks back at their relationship, from an election-night meeting to the small disappointments he failed to see. It is a romantic comedy, but it also gives both people room to be complicated.

His second novel, Perfect Timing, moves from the cinema to Edinburgh's comedy and music scene. Jess Henson wants a stand-up career; Tom Delaney is chasing a future with his band. A strong first connection gets tangled up in bad information, anxiety, ambition, and years of near misses. Nicholls is interested in what people say badly, what they leave unsaid, and how much life can change between one meeting and the next.

For him, the meet-cute is only the beginning of the story.

Across these novels, he returns to people who love stories almost as much as they want to live one. His characters make jokes, quote films, write songs, chase creative work, and sometimes use those things to avoid a hard conversation. The humor is part of the point, but so is the awkwardness of growing up, choosing a direction, and realizing that romance needs more than a perfectly timed speech. Readers who enjoy a pop-culture thread alongside emotional messiness will find that balance in both books.

His early novel work was selected for the National Centre for Writing's Escalator talent-development program, and he later returned as a mentor. Alongside fiction, he continues to work across screen and audio projects and has run workshops for aspiring writers.

Nicholls remains based in Norfolk. Between the page and the screen, he keeps returning to the same appealing question: what happens after life refuses to follow the script?