Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times - in 2002, 2006 and 2009. Her novels have won the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and have also been shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Her novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch have all been adapted for television. Sarah Waters has been named Author of the Year four times: by the British Book Awards, the Booksellers’ Association, Waterstone’s Booksellers and the Stonewall Awards. She lives in London, and was awarded an OBE in 2019.

Born: 21 July 1966

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Where to start with Sarah Waters: a guide to her best books

Celebrated for her spellbinding historical fiction and Gothic flair, Sarah Waters has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Here, her editor of over 20 years, Lennie Goodings, offers a guide to her work

Sarah Waters interview: ‘I turned my night terrors into a ghost story’

The author of The Little Stranger, our Monthly Spotlight title for October, talks about using ghosts to embody middle-class fears, and the writers who showed her that queer fiction could be clever and ambitious

Haunted house with The Little Stranger book overlay.

Reading guide: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

In postwar Warwickshire, a doctor is called to Hundreds Hall, a mansion in decline. As he becomes involved with the Ayres family, he discovers they may be haunted by something far more sinister than a dying way of life

Staircase in a haunted house with The Little Stranger book overlay.

Read an extract from The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009, Sarah Waters’ chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain is full of rich atmosphere and psychological complexity