Sarah Waters OBE (born 1966) is a Welsh novelist whose six published novels have made a sustained contribution to contemporary British historical fiction and LGBTQ+ literature. Born in Wales and based in London, she is particularly associated with narratives that revisit the past through women’s lives, desire, secrecy, and social constraint.
Waters’s debut, Tipping the Velvet (1998), was followed by Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006), The Little Stranger (2009), and The Paying Guests (2014). Fingersmith, the supplied catalogue title, was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the CWA Historical Dagger and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. Her work has also travelled beyond the novel: several books have been adapted for television and theatre, while Park Chan-wook’s film The Handmaiden was inspired by Fingersmith.
Her honours include the Somerset Maugham Award for Affinity, election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009, and appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to literature. Her official publisher-hosted website continues to list news and public literary events.
This profile is awaiting source review; collected books are already linked below.
