Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She studied English literature at the University of Kent, completed postgraduate work at Lancaster University and earned a doctorate on lesbian and gay historical fiction at Queen Mary University of London. Her academic research fed directly into a writing career concerned with recovering queer lives from periods when they were often hidden, criminalised or excluded from conventional historical narratives.

Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet, follows a young woman through music halls and lesbian communities in Victorian London. Affinity uses the setting of a women’s prison and the culture of spiritualism, while Fingersmith reworks sensation fiction through fraud, confinement and shifting identity. She later moved into the twentieth century with The Night Watch, set around the Second World War, The Little Stranger and The Paying Guests. Waters combines meticulous social detail with gothic, crime and romantic forms, but her central concern is often who controls the story of a life. Her novels are essential for readers interested in queer history, gender, class and the unstable boundary between respectable society and its concealed alternatives.