Sarah Waters | Signed First Editions

About Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, in 1966, and grew up in South Wales. She studied English Literature at the University of Kent, took her MA at Lancaster, and completed her PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where her thesis on lesbian and gay historical fictions from 1870 to the present gave her both the scholarly grounding and the imaginative raw material for the novels that followed. She has said that she wanted to write the kind of book she couldn’t find on the shelves, and that instinct, personal, deliberate, and entirely her own, has driven everything she has produced since.

Her debut, Tipping the Velvet, appeared in 1998, published by Virago. Set in the music halls and back streets of Victorian London, it followed a young woman’s picaresque journey through desire, performance, and class. It won the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the BBC television adaptation in 2002, directed by Andrew Davies, brought it to a much wider audience. Affinity followed a year later, a quieter and more unsettling book, set in the world of Victorian spiritualism and women’s prisons, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Stonewall Book Award.

Fingersmith (2002) is the novel that cemented her reputation. A densely plotted Victorian thriller of identity, deception, and sexual awakening, it was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger. The BBC adapted it for television in 2005, with Sally Hawkins and Imelda Staunton, and the novel later provided the source material for Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016), a South Korean film set in Japanese-occupied Korea that won numerous international awards and introduced Waters’s story to a global cinema audience.

She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times in total, with The Night Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger (2009) both making the list. The Night Watch, a Second World War novel told in reverse chronology, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize as well, and adapted for BBC television in 2011. The Little Stranger, a ghost story set in a crumbling Warwickshire country house in the late 1940s, was made into a feature film in 2018, directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Her most recent novel, The Paying Guests (2014), set in 1920s south London, was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The honours have accumulated steadily. She was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2003, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009, and awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2019. She was included in Granta’s list of Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, and received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in recognition of her entire body of work. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-four languages.

What distinguishes Waters in historical fiction is the precision of her research combined with an instinct for narrative tension that owes as much to Victorian sensation fiction as it does to literary tradition. Her novels are serious, formally ambitious works that also happen to be genuinely hard to put down, a combination that has earned her both critical admiration and a devoted popular readership across three decades of writing.