Sarah Waters (born 21 July 1966) is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith. Read full biography of Sarah Waters →
My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.
My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.
My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.
Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.
I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and... →
I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its... →
I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a... →
I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over... →
Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't... →
People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about... →
The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the... →
The relationship you have with your mother is like nothing else. They do kind of know everything about you, even though they don't confront it.... →
When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating... →
Sarah Waters (born 21 July 1966) is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.