Welsh writer Sarah Waters was BOTD in 1966. Born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, she grew up in Middlesbrough, England. She studied at the University of Kent and Lancaster University, before completing a doctorate at Queen Mary University of London on erotic writing of the Victorian era. Her academic research inspired her 1998 debut novel Tipping the Velvet, a rollicking Dickensian pastiche about a young woman who falls in love with a cross-dressing female music hall performer. (The book’s title was taken from Victorian-era slang for cunnilingus). An instant bestseller, it was successfully filmed for television and was credited with popularising LGBTQ-themed historical fiction. Waters continued her success with 1999’s Affinity, which won the Stonewall Book Award and Somerset Maugham Award. Her 2002 novel Fingersmith, a dazzling thriller about pickpockets who attempt to take control of a young heiress’ fortune, was nominated for the Booker Prize and adapted for television and film. The Night Watch, a daisy-chain of lesbian love stories set against World War Two, was highly praised for its evocation of London during the Blitz, and again nominated for the Booker Prize and adapted for television. Her 2009 novel The Little Stranger, a ghostly drama about a working-class doctor’s obsession with a decaying aristocratic family, heavily inspired by Evelyn Waugh‘s Brideshead Revisited, was filmed in 2018. Her most recent novel The Paying Guests, about a clandestine lesbian affair between an impoverished upper-class woman and her working-class lodger, was published in 2014. Openly lesbian since forever, Waters lives in London with her long-term partner Lucy Vaughan.