Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters is a Welsh-born novelist who moved to Middlesbrough, England when she was a young girl. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a housewife. Waters casually wrote fiction as a child but did not consider writing as an occupation until much later in life. After completing grammar school, Waters went to college to study English. Waters received her BA from the University of Kent, an MA from Lancaster University, and, finally, a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. After college, while working as an academic, Waters began working on her first novel, Tipping the Velvet. Virago Press picked up Tipping the Velvet and published it in 1998. Tipping the Velvet is a romantic picaresque novel that explores gender and sexuality. Waters identifies as a lesbian and many of her novels feature gay and lesbian characters and themes. In fact, The Little Stranger, Waters’s fifth novel, is her first work to deviate from this pattern. The Little Stranger is likely Waters’s best-known work, largely because of its 2018 film adaptation. Following the publication of The Little Stranger in 2009, Waters wrote her most recent novel, The Paying Guests, which came out in 2014. Throughout her career, critics have praised Waters’s novels, and in 2019 she was awarded Order of the British Empire for services to literature. Today, Waters lives in London where she continues to write.