Sarah Waters

What draws me to Sarah Waters is her nerve. Writing lesbian protagonists into the gaslit gloom of Victorian England, then making those stories genuinely gripping, takes both craft and conviction. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith are not period decoration; they are tense, intimate machines, and the fact that Fingersmith fueled a film as ravishing as The Handmaiden tells you how potent her source material is. The awards, from the Somerset Maugham to her OBE, feel earned rather than ornamental. I think of her as a true storytelling craftsman who slips emotional ambushes into immaculately researched rooms, and I trust her completely.

Name (English)

Sarah Waters

Name (Japanese)

サラ・ウォーターズ

Reading

さら・うぉーたーず

Born

July 21, 1966 (age 60)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Horse

Origin

Neyland, United Kingdom

Occupation

novelist / writer

University

University of Kent

Awards & achievements

• Lambda Literary Award
• 2009 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 2002 CWA Historical Dagger
• Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• 2000 Somerset Maugham Award
• 2014 honorary doctorate

• Official sitehttps://www.sarahwaters.com/
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah%20Waters
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A9%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BA
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q237555

Tags

• novelist
• writer

Last updated

2026-06-21

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.