Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966 and now lives in London. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University. She won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted twice for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Award and was the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2000. Fingersmith, her third novel, was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize, and won the CWA Ellis Petes Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and The South Bank Show Award for Literature. She won Author of the Year 2002 at the British Book Awards and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2003.

Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith have both been adapted for BBC TV. Find out more at Sarah Waters' official site!