The Writers of Wales Database

WATERS, SARAH

Website: http://www.sarahwaters.com/
Tel: via Virago on 020 7911 8000

Sarah was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire in 1966 and studied as an undergraduate at the University of Kent. She gained a PhD in English Literature after submitting a thesis entitled 'Wolfskins and togas: lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the present'. This provided the inspiration and research material for her fiction, which she started to write immediately after gaining her doctorate. Best known as a lesbian-genre novelist, Sarah has also worked as an Associate Lecturer with the Open University. Her first four novels have been adapted for television, following the success of Andrew Davies's 2002 dramatisation of Tipping the Velvet (Virago, 1998) for the BBC. Her most recent novel, The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009), is currently in development as a feature film.

Sarah has won a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She has twice been shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. In 2003 she was named Author of the Year three times (by the British Book Awards, The Booksellers’ Association and Waterstone’s Booksellers) and was also chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists that year. Fingersmith was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize, won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the South Bank Show Award for Literature, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Night Watch (Virago, 2006) was on the 2007 Wales Book of the Year longlist and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Little Stranger was also on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize.

Sarah lives in London and is a Fellow of The Welsh Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.


Reviews:
With respect to Affinity (Virago, 2000)

"…Spooky, spellbinding, exquisitely written … I do believe Waters is on the way to becoming a major literary star…"
Val Hennessy

"…A work of intense and atmospheric imagination … Sarah Waters is … a kind of feminist Dickens…"
The Telegraph


With respect to The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009)

"…It’s a gripping story, with beguiling characters . . . As well as being a supernatural tale, it is a meditation n the nature of the British and class, and how things are rarely what they seem. Chilling..."
Kate Mosse, The Times

"...By now readers must be confident of her mastery of storytelling . . . While at one turn, the novel looks to be a ghost story, the next it is a psychological drama . . . But it is also a brilliantly observed story, verging on the comedy, about Britain on the cusp of modern age . . . The writing is subtle and poised..."
Joy lo Dico,Independent on Sunday


Selected Publications:
Tipping the Velvet (Virago, 1999)
Affinity (Virago, 2000)
Fingersmith (Virago, 2002)
The Night Watch (Virago, 2006)
The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009)

Contributed to:
Dancing with Mr Darcy (editor) (Honno, 2009)

Tipping the Velvet (Virago, 1999)

Nan is captivated by the music hall phenomenon that is Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they start an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins.

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The Night Watch (Virago, 2006)

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941. This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching ...Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret ...Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover...Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances ...Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, it is set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary.

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The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009)

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners – mother, son and daughter – are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own.

But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.

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