Sarah Waters

One of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers. British Book Awards Author of the Year 2003. Waterstone’s Author of the Year 2003. Winner of the Somerset Maugham prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2002. Shortlisted for the Orange, Man Booker and Mail on Sunday/John Llewelyn Rhys prizes… Sarah Waters’ impressive list of literary achievements is too long to list in full here – but suffice it to say we’re thrilled to welcome her to the Port Eliot Festival.

Sarah Waters’ first novel, Tipping the Velvet, was published in February 1998 and the Telegraph claimed “this could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson”. It was also adapted by Andrew Davies for BBC drama in 2002.

Her second novel, Affinity (1999), prompted A N Wilson to hail Sarah as “such a brilliant writer that her readers would believe anything she told them”, while the Guardian predicted Affinity to be “the very type of book which may turn out to be the signature of late 20th-Century fiction in Britain”. Sarah was awarded the Somerset Maugham prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for Affinity, as well being runner-up for the Welsh Book Of the Year Award, all in 2000. Affinity was also shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and dramatised on ITV earlier this year.

Sarah’s third and fourth novels, Fingersmith and Night Watch, were both shortlisted for both the Orange and Man Booker Prizes. Fingersmith won the CWA Historical Dagger prize for historical crime fiction and was picked more than any other novel as a Book of the Year 2002. It was dramatised as a major 3-part BBC1 drama starring Charles Dance and Imelda Staunton in 2005.

Sarah’s new novel, The Little Stranger, will be published by Virago in June this year.

www.sarahwaters.com

“One of the best storytellers alive”
The Independent

“This outstandingly gifted novelist releases her imagination into her most compelling depiction yet of women’s struggles for various kinds of liberation.”
The Times

Links: