Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters, OBE, was born in Wales in 1966. She has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998), which won the Betty Trask Award; Affinity (1999), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fingersmith (2002), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; The Night Watch (2006), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; The Little Stranger (2009), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award; and The Paying Guests (2014) which was shortlisted for The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and was published in paperback in June 2015.

She was included in Granta’s prestigious list of ‘Best of Young British Novelists 2003’, and in the same year, was voted Author of the Year by both publishers and booksellers at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference, and won the Waterstones Author of the Year Award. She was awarded the Stonewall Writer of the Decade in 2015, the Diva Magazine Author of the Year Award in 2017, and The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, which is given in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work. Sarah was presented with an OBE in 2019 for services to literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Sarah Waters lives in London.

Television adaptations include Tipping the Velvet (multi-award winning, BAFTA nominated) by Sally Head Productions for BBC; Fingersmith (BAFTA nominated) by Sally Head Productions for BBC; Affinity (several awards worldwide) by Box TV for ITV; The Night Watch for BBC. In 2017 visionary director Park Chan-wook released The Handmaiden, a film inspired by Fingersmith, and The Little Stranger, a feature film with Potboiler Productions, adapted by Lucinda Coxon and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, was released in cinemas nationwide in 2019.

Sarah co-wrote an original stage show with Christopher Green, The Frozen Scream, which premiered in December 2014 at the Cardiff Millennium Centre and the Birmingham Hippodrome. A stage adaptation of Fingersmith (written by Alexa Junge and directed by Bill Rauch) premiered at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in February 2015, and Tipping the Velvet (written by Laura Wade and directed by Lyndsey Turner for the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith and the Edinburgh Lyceum) premiered on 19th September 2015. The Night Watch was adapted for the stage by Hattie Naylor and premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, directed by Rebecca Gatward. It was one of the Top 5 plays of 2016 voted for by The Observer theatre critic Suzanna Clapp, and a new production for The Original Theatre Company and York Theatre Royal toured nationwide in the UK in 2019