After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels – Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith – Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote The Night Watch, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker prizes, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart.

In her latest book, The Little Stranger, she remains in the 1940s, setting her story in rural Warwickshire, in a crumbling manor house haunted by a dying way of life – and perhaps by something more sinister... The Little Stranger has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has won the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted twice for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Award and won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2000. Fingersmith, her third novel, was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize, and won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and The South Bank Show Award for Literature.

In 2002, she was named Author of the Year three times: by the British Book Awards, by the Booksellers’ Association and by Waterstone's Booksellers. She was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. Fingersmith, Affinity and Tipping the Velvet have all been adapted for TV.

Dr Emma Parker is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on twentieth century and contemporary literature. She has published widely on contemporary women’s writing, is a founding member of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network, and Associate Editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing published by Oxford University Press.

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  photo: Charlie Hopkinson

  This is a ticketed event. For free tickets, please contact Rebecca Vickerman on 0116 252 2320 or rv40@le.ac.uk.

• Followed by a book-signing.

Links

• Sarah Waters website