Sarah Waters – Year of election 2009

Sarah Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet, published in 1998 when she was 32, was a Victorian “romp” of which The Independent on Sunday asked, “Could this be a new genre? The bawdy lesbian picaresque novel?” It won a Betty Trask Award and was serialised on BBC television in 2002. Her novels since have been Affinity, which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was also adapted for television, Fingersmith, again adapted, and winner of the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and the South Bank Show Award for Literature, The Night Watch and The Little Stranger. In 2003 she was named one of Granta’s 20 Best of Young British Novelists.

Waters, who lives in south London, finds city-living, she says, “a constant source of inspiration. I love the fact that the layers of London's history are still so visible on its streets. I love the crowdedness of London. It’s a place full of stories; and stories – and how best to tell them – are what really interest me as a writer.”