By Tony Organ
Sarah Waters was born in Cleddau Avenue, Neyland in 1966. She has a PhD in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University.
She has written many novels:
‘Tipping the Velvet’ (1998), which won a Betty Trask Award.
‘Affinity’ (1999), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
‘Fingersmith’ (2002), which was short-listed 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.
‘The Paying Guest’ (2014) which was shortlisted for the Baileys’ Women’s Prize for Fiction.
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’. In April 2015 she joined the Council of the Society of Authors. She was named ‘Writer of the Decade’ at the Stonewall Awards in late 2015.
TV and film adaptations include ‘Tipping the Velvet’ by Sally Head Productions for BBC; ‘Fingersmith’ by Sally Head Productions for BBC; ‘Affinity’ by Box TV for ITV; ‘The Night Watch’ for BBC. ‘Fingersmith’ was the inspiration for Park Chan-Wook’s Academy Award-Winning feature film ‘The Handmaiden’, while the ‘Little Stranger’ was adapted as a feature film with ‘Potboiler Productions’, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and with a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon.
Sarah co-wrote an original stage show with Christopher Green, ‘The Frozen Scream’, which premiered in December 2014 at the Cardiff Millennium Centre and Birmingham Hippodrome.
A stage adaptation of 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. A play based on The Night Watch (written by Hattie Naylor) premiered at the Royal Exchange, Manchester in May 2016.
Sarah Waters is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2019 she was awarded an OBE for services to literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.