Its central character, Susan, is a pickpocket. Fingersmith was published in 2002, a thriller and love story set among petty thieves and criminals in 1860s London. This book won a Somerset Maugham Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction and a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2000, and was adapted for television in 2008. Her second novel, Affinity (1999), is a darker novel set in a London women's prison, and explores the Victorian world of spiritualism. This book was adapted into a drama serial by Andrew Davies, and received much press attention when it was shown on BBC TV in 2002. In 1998, her first novel Tipping the Velvet was published - a picaresque adventure based around Victorian music hall, with a lesbian love story at its centre.

She has since written three novels set in Victorian England, for which she has received high praise from both mainstream reviewers and the gay and lesbian press. While working on her Ph.D thesis, she became increasingly interested in London life of the nineteenth century, and began writing fiction. She then gained a Ph.D in English Literature, her field of study being lesbian and gay historical fiction, and also had articles on gender, sexuality and history published in a number of journals. She studied English Literature at the universities of Kent and Lancaster, after which she worked in bookshops and libraries, before returning to postgraduate study. Sarah Waters was born in 1966 in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Sarah waters author