Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Sarah Waters Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters Biography

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University.

She has written five novels: Tipping the Velvet, which won the Betty Trask Award; Affinity, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday /John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fingersmith, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; The Night Watch, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; and The Little Stranger, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award.

She was included in Granta's prestigious list of 'Best of Young British Novelists 2003', and in the same year was voted Author of the Year by both publishers and booksellers at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference, and won the Waterstone's Author of the Year Award.

Adaptations include Tipping the Velvet (multi award winning, BAFTA nominated) by Sally Head Productions for BBC;  Fingersmith (BAFTA nominated) by Sally Head Productions for BBC; Affinity (several awards worldwide) by Box TV for ITV; The Night Watch for BBC. The Little Stranger is in development as a feature film with Potboiler Productions, adapted by Lucinda Coxon and to be directed by Lennie Abrahamson.

Stage adaptations of Tipping The Velvet (written by Laura Wade, to be directed by Lindsay Turner for Lyric Theatre/Edinburgh Lyceum) and Fingersmith (written by Alexa Junge, to be directed by Bill Rauch for The Oregon Shakespeare Festival) are to be presented in 2015.

Sarah has co-written with Christopher Green an original stage show, The Frozen Scream to premiere in December 2014 at Birmingham Hippodrome and Cardiff Millennium Centre.

Sarah Waters's website

This bio was last updated on 09/04/2014. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Books by this Author

Books by Sarah Waters at BookBrowse
Tipping The Velvet (Virago Modern Classics) jacket The Paying Guests jacket The Little Stranger jacket The Night Watch jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Sarah Waters but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Lucy Ashe

    Lucy Ashe

    Lucy Ashe is an English teacher at a school in London. After training at the Royal Ballet School, she decided to change career plans and go to university. She studied English literature at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, before ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Paying Guests

    Try:
    The Dance of the Dolls
    by Lucy Ashe

  • Julian Barnes

    Julian Barnes

    Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honors) in ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Paying Guests

    Try:
    The Sense of an Ending
    by Julian Barnes

We recommend 11 similar authors


Non-members can see 2 results. Become a member
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris
by Evie Woods
From the million-copy bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop.
Book Jacket
The Devil Finds Work
by James Baldwin
A book-length essay on racism in American films, by "the best essayist in this country" (The New York Times Book Review).
Book Jacket
The River Knows Your Name
by Kelly Mustian
A haunting Southern novel about memory and love, from the author of The Girls in the Stilt House.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Happy Land
    by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

    From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.

  • Book Jacket

    The Seven O'Clock Club
    by Amelia Ireland

    Four strangers join an experimental treatment to heal broken hearts in Amelia Ireland's heartfelt debut novel.

  • Book Jacket

    The Fairbanks Four
    by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue

    One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

  • Book Jacket

    One Death at a Time
    by Abbi Waxman

    A cranky ex-actress and her Gen Z sobriety sponsor team up to solve a murder that could send her back to prison in this dazzling mystery.

Who Said...

To make a library it takes two volumes and a fire. Two volumes and a fire, and interest. The interest alone will ...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

A C on H S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.