Shots Magazine recalls Sarah Water’s being awarded the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger by the Crime Writers Association in 2002. The award announcement was made at a reception at the Crime in Store bookshop in Store Street, Covent Garden in London, on Wednesday 30th October 2002.
The book was also short-listed for the Man Booker Award. The Ellis Peters judges described it as a dark and subtle novel. It is set in Victorian England and, the judges say, creates a stunning atmosphere of wickedness and fear. "Scene after scene brilliantly brings to life the period and the characters involved in a cunning scheme to defraud an heiress."
Chairman of the judges, Susanna Yager, said: "Fingersmith announced itself as the winner as soon as we read it. It is an outstanding book in any category."
Sarah Waters said, "It is wonderful to have won. My passion for historical fiction was what got me writing in the first place."
The Historical Dagger Award was sponsored by Publishers Headline, Little Brown and the estate of Ellis Peters [the pen name of Edith Pargeter].
Following the announcement in October, it was formerly presented at the CWA The Macallan Awards Lunch in London on 7 November 2002 at The Brewery, in Chiswell Street East London.
Click Here for photos and short report from 2002 [because the Internet never forgets its History].
Incidentally, it was in 2002, that the Crime Writers Association in partnership with Ian Fleming Publications awarded the inaugural Steel Dagger to John Creed for best thriller for The Sirius Crossing [the pen name for Eoin McNamee] – More information about John Creed / Eoin McNamee CLICK HERE.
Anyway, apology for the digression.
It was with delight that following his lengthy and incisive conversation in Madrid with John Connolly [Archived HERE] our Spanish Editor [writer, book reviewer and literary commentator] met up with Sarah Waters at this summer’s Celsuis 232 literary festival in Aviles Spain.
John previous visited the Celsius 232 Festival in 2019 interviewing Hanna Jameson, Sarah Pinborough and John Connolly for Shots Magazine.
Anyway, Shots Magazine are delighted to present, the conversation between Sarah Waters and John Parker for our readers.
John Parker: I'm with the celebrated writer Sarah Waters who is here to participate in the 14th Edition of the festival, Celsius 232.
Sarah Waters: Hello. Here I am!
John: How are you today?
Sarah: I’m a little bit tired. We had an early start and then a long time at the airport but it’s very nice to be here. I’ve never been at the Celsius 232 festival before.
John: Do you speak any languages?
Sarah (laughing): Not really apart from a smattering of French and a bit of German. I’ve been practicing Spanish a little bit on Duolingo but only for about a week……I can say I want an ice-cream…..
.......................Laughter..................
John: Oh, but in this heat that’s a very important thing to be able to say!
Sarah: I agree.
John: Can we talk about your origins. I know you're Welsh, but you were brought up in Middlesbrough
Sarah: I lived in Middlesbrough for a few years. Originally my Father worked near Milford Haven in a big oil refinery [in South Wales] and my Dad got a job when I was about 8 up to another Refinery Area in the North-East - so we moved to Middleborough; But we returned to Pembrokeshire [South Wales] - so I had this weird 5 years in the middle, in the North East of England.
John: Were you a good student at school?
Sarah: I was, I’m afraid. I was a bit of a swot! I think many writers start off like that.
John: I've read that you wanted to be an archaeologist.
Sarah: Oh yeah I did!
John: But it wasn’t an Indiana Jones influence?
Sarah: No, this was pre- Indiana Jones. I think, actually, a big
influence was the Tutankhamun Exhibition which was about 1975, not that I went,
because it was in London and we were in Pembrokeshire, but it was everywhere in
the media, wasn't it?
Then I went to Kent to study for a Degree in English and American Literature. I finished that wanting to do more study [this was in the days when you could get academic grants], so I continued my studies, completing an M.A and then moved to London. I still had a hankering towards academia, so after a couple of years I went back and did a PhD in London.
John: When you were younger I guess you read a lot?
Sarah: Yes, I did, I did. We weren’t really a bookish family in the sense that we didn’t have books knocking around the house. I remember very fondly that my dad would take me to the library. I read what seemed to me to be a lot. We used to watch a lot of telly as well, which I’m still very fond of. Yeah, I remember getting to the age of about 10 and being able to make a choice… that wonderful thing of making your own choices about what you want to read. The school classroom had its own little library. I found some great books.
John: Are there any books you read that stand out in your memory?
Sarah: There’s one I
talked about quite recently briefly on the radio. It was The White Mountains by John Christopher,
which was the tripods. Did you ever read that?
John: Yes, I did. At school!
Sarah: I only ever read the first one though I’ve read the others since in the trilogy, and God, it was terrific! Just that whole kind of… it starts off like a historical novel but then you realize it’s in the future and that just really captivated me. And I read lots of ghost stories and horror stories. And Doctor Who books. So I was always into gothic from an early age.
John: Ghost stories and horror stories? That’s the sort of thing I like to talk about! When you say horror, are we talking about the Herbert Van Thal books?
Sarah: Yes!! …….laughter…… In fact I’ve been ordering them up again recently to revisit them. They’re a real mixed bag. There are some really dreadful stories and some really, quite misogynistic stories but they are all mixed up with some real classics by people like Ray Bradbury and Angus Wilson. You know “Raspberry Jam”, do you remember that? That one really stuck in my mind. So they’re an interesting thing to revisit. And those covers! Some of those covers, I still feel a sort of slightly child’s thrill…
John: The head…
Sarah: The head in the bucket!
John: The hand with the eye in the middle!
Sarah: And also there was one which is like a face in a muddy field. It’s like a corpse’s face…
John: …coming out of the ground.
Sarah: Yes. In fact, I’ve got that in my study. I have to have it with its cover down because it still bothers me the way it bothered me as a child. Even though I loved reading them.
John: And ghost stories? I suppose M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and others of that ilk?
Sarah: Yes, but I don’t know that I was encountering them much at that age. They were like children’s anthologies of ghost stories that I was reading.
John: Mary Danby?
Sarah: Yeah, Mary Danby! So, I loved those and it was also the time of… did you ever get “The Unexplained” magazine? That was from when I was a young teen…
John: I don’t think I did actually.
Sarah: God, I loved that magazine so much. –and I believed every word in it. And I was reading the Erich Von Daniken books, you know, Chariots of The Gods, when I was about 14 and believed every word (laughter).
John: And Super Nature by Lyall Watson…
Sarah: Yeah. I didn’t actually read that one, though. But I’ve never lost my enthusiasm for that kind of thing.
John: And what else? I read that other influences include the likes of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Shelley, and the Brontes. Do you revisit the old classics?
Sarah: Yes, I do actually. And there are some Dickens, even though I’m such a fan - I only recently read [for the first time], A Tale of Two Cities, which is great!
John: It is a good book though I read it a long time ago in the late 80s. While it’s hardly original to say, Great Expectations is the one that I have always loved. I think it’s because it was the first Dickens I read.
Sarah: It is wonderful though, isn’t it? I reread Bleak House recently and that’s amazing. You can’t beat Dickens, really.
John: Can you tell me what the London North Writer’s Circle is/was? And does it still exist?
Sarah: It was a writing group. This was just as I was about to get published. And I think writers groups, like book groups in which I’d also been for a long time, they weren’t as common then as they are now. So it was somebody… actually, I’ll tell you who it was, it was Charles Palliser. He wrote a book called The Quincunx; that was his big book in about 1988, 1989. I went to an event he did. I said I was writing and hoping to get published and he said he’d just left this book group so I joined it. I wasn’t there for very long but it was interesting. We shared our work and commented on each other’s.
John: Something in your [1995] thesis has piqued my interest, so what is Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness”. What’s that all about?
Sarah:…….laughing…… Have you not read it!?
John: I have not. Should I?
Sarah: You’ve got to read it. It’s a lesbian classic. Or is it a trans classic? Because that’s an interesting thing. It’s a really, really interesting book written in 1928 and just talks very, very frankly about a woman who grows up feeling different, masculine, attracted to other women and the trials and difficulties she faces. So it’s incredibly honest and a bit earnest. I mean Radclyffe wasn’t the greatest writer in the world and she was so determined to make this book like a bit of a crusade and it’s terribly earnest but it’s really very, very moving.
John: Back around 2002 I was introduced by my sister Jean to a book called Fingersmith, which she gave to me and told me I was going to love it. And I did! I thought it was marvelous. Unfortunately I lent it to someone else and never got it back.
Sarah: Ah, never lend a book, it never goes well.
John: But your first book was Tipping the Velvet. Tell us about that for new readers not so familiar with your work.
Sarah: Well, its set in the 1890s about an oyster girl in Whitstable, Kent who sees a music hall artiste, Kitty Butler, a male impersonator, falls in love with her and joins her act. She gets her heart broken, lives a bit of a rackety life in Victorian London and then marries the right girl, well, meets the right girl in the end. So it’s kind of picaresque.
John: Did you say it was bawdy or am I imagining that?
Sarah: It did get called bawdy quite a lot but I think by today’s standards, it’s probably quite tame.
…………………Laughter……………….
John: Affinity was next in 1999. That book involves spiritualism. I was going to ask if you were interested in the subject but I know now that you are.
Sarah: Oh, I am! Who can resist it really? It’s the séance, the dark room… especially when you combine it with our stereotypes about Victorian kind of repression and suddenly there’s these very odd sometimes quite sexy things going on in the darkness of the séance room and what was going on and who knew what and who was a charlatan… yeah, just a fascinating world. And the book is partly set in a women’s prison so it’s two very different worlds and the connections between them.
John: Would you say then that Fingersmith was the book that really put you on the map?
Sarah: Yeah, that was a really big year for me because the book got me on a couple of shortlists, the Orange Prize as it was then and the Man Booker Prize and in the same year Tipping the Velvet had been adapted for TV so that came out in the same year. Suddenly I was getting a lot more attention than I had got before. In a nice way!
John: I would hope so! And you were happy with the Tipping the Velvet TV adaptation?
Sarah: Yes
John: That was with Sally Hawkins, right?
Sarah: It was! She was unknown then. It was one of her first roles. She just had a minor role, actually. Rachael Stirling had the main role.
John: I would like to see it but it hasn’t been on Spanish TV to my knowledge.
Sarah: It’s very creaky looking back at it now. Even Fingersmith, which is the one where Sally Hawkins had the main role, I was always very fond of that, but even that looks very slow now. It’s amazing how quickly styles of storytelling change on TV.
John: Ok, The Night Watch, 2006. Set in the 1940s, a tale of loss and betrayal.
Sarah: Yes, against the backdrop of The Blitz
John: Was that adapted for TV?
Sarah: Yeah, it was actually. The BBC did that in 2011. It was a one-parter, a 90-minute adaptation. That was ok. It had some great moments. It had Anna Maxwell Martin in it who was great. Claire Foy too.
John: The Little Stranger was next in 2009. I first came across it in an English text book for students who are preparing for Cambridge English exams.
Sarah: Oh really??
John: They had a snippet from the book followed by questions.
Sarah: What did they ask, I wonder? Was it just comprehension questions?
John: That’s right. I was looking for the book yesterday but I couldn’t find it. Cambridge change the books fairly often.
Sarah: A pity.
John: Anyway, it’s a ghost story…
Sarah: A poltergeist, actually. I loved writing that book. I really felt like I was reconnecting with my childhood interest in ghosts and such.
John: Ok. The Paying Guests in 2014.
Sarah: A long time ago! That’s my last book. It’s 12 years ago.
John: Time flies…
Sarah: I know! It speeds up as you get older, doesn’t it?
John: It sure does!
John: During the pandemic, during lockdown, did you say, ¨Oh. I’m going to write a book!”?
…….Laughter…..
Sarah: The thing is, lockdown didn’t make that much difference to me.
John: Well, you couldn’t go out.
Sarah: No, but I was still working away at home just as usual and in some ways it was a release that I didn’t have to go out but that was when I was working on this book that I went on to abandon.
John: Do you want to talk about that or are you not really happy to?
Sarah: I’m happy to talk about it. It was just… it was another slightly Gothic story set in the early 1950s. You know, I think I made some very basic wrong decisions about who was telling the story, so I might go back to it and look at it from a different angle. I don’t know about that but maybe…
John: Going back to The Paying Guests, it was set in the 1920s and there is a lesbian relationship which is the backdrop to a murder investigation.
Sarah: Yes, there is. I’ll tell you writing that gave me a whole new respect for crime writers, because suddenly I had to juggle, I had to think about, the moment that a police inspector walks in and starts looking around. I had to just be thinking about the jeopardy, you know, it was really interesting about what he knew, what they knew he didn’t know, what he might find out next, you know? The sort of things that you always have in a novel, really but just much more intense in a crime story.
John: Did you plot it out very carefully or did you follow the muse?
Sarah: No, all of them I have to plot out quite carefully because they are often fairly complicated plots. I want to know where I’m going when, I start.
John: I heard you were invited into The Royal Society of Literature in 2009 which is an extraordinary honour.
Sarah: Yes and I was actually made a fellow…….you get to sign your name in a big book using… [when I did it]….. you had a choice of using Byron’s pen or Charles Dickens’s quill pen.
John: Wow, really?
Sarah: Yes, so I chose Dickens, obviously, and the person in front of me used it …..however….. it collapsed in their hand.
John: What? No!
Sarah: It just collapsed so I had to use Byron’s. So I said, well, can I at least hold it? So I held this broken pen of Dickens’s.
John: Oh, that’s sad
Sarah: They’ve got a whole range. They’ve got a Jean Rhys pen, a George Eliot pen…
John: Interesting
Sarah: Yeah but it just means that … well, it’s quite a nice, prestigious thing, I suppose and also sometimes they appeal to fellows for support in campaigns or to do stuff for them.
John: And to cap it all an OBE in 2019.
Sarah: Oh God, yeah…
John: You went to Buckingham Palace, did you met the Queen?
Sarah: It wasn’t the Queen, it was Prince William. My parents came and they loved it so that was nice.
John: What about the state of literature today. How do you see it? I mentioned to you before we started that The Guardian had a story titled “Nine out of 10 bestselling novels in UK have one thing in common: a woman is murdered.” earlier in the week.
Sarah: Were they all crime titles or were they a range of novels?
John: They weren’t all crime, no.
Sarah: Isn’t that interesting? Of course, we do live in a world where women are being killed all the time so in some ways in just kind of reflects life and the dangers of being a woman. I haven´t read the article, I’ve just seen the headline but I suspect what has changed, I know what has changed in like dramas, for example is that it’s dealt with slightly differently now, you know from the feminist perspective, post Me Too, quite rightly or there’s not that lingering attention on the perpetrators as much as there used to be. I suspect something is definitely shifting in the way that we tell stories about the murders of women but I was surprised that that was still a dominant part of modern fiction.
John: I often ask people I meet if they are reading a book or if they have one to recommend.
Sarah: I am currently reading a book of short stories called Salt Slow by Julia Armfield who wrote a book a few years ago called Our Wives Under The Sea, which is a slightly sci-fi story and she’s a really great young writer, I think. It’s very gothic and it’s sort of women’s bodies and strange things happening to women’s bodies but in a quite empowering sort of way. So I’m enjoying them very much.
John: Are you a music lover?
Sarah: Do you know what? I feel terrible saying this because it sounds
so philistine but I don’t really listen to music for itself.
John: It’s just on?
Sarah: Yes, it’s just on and sometimes it can be just cheesy pop. I love the way… you know, if I listen to Greatest Hits radio which has a lot of 80s and 90s, I just love the way a pop song , and it can be the cheesiest pop song in the world from some point in your youth, can set off this extraordinary intensity of feeling. I love that about pop music.
John: Can you remember the first record you bought?
Sarah: Yes, it was Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick by Ian Dury.
John: Love it! Even my mother loved that!
Sarah. Oh, my mother loved it too!
……………Laughter……
John: A film?
Sarah: A film. Oh, I just watched Marty Supreme. I know it’s a bit late. ….Sarah sees John frown.... smiling…..Didn’t you like it? Oh my God, I loved it! Why didn’t you like it?
John: Marty really got on my nerves.
Sarah: He did? Actually, my partner was a bit like that. Lucy. We watched it together and she just wanted to give him a bit of a slap but I just totally went with it and just believed in him.
John: It does have its good moments like the “bath” scene.
……………Laughter………….
Sarah: I liked the energy of it and it actually really cheered me up because I think we live in such a politically awful time and then there’s climate change and everything. Art and Literature can be a bit po-faced at the moment but this had such great energy. Oh, I also watched Sinners which also had this extravagance, like maximalist and I thought that was really heartening somehow, just the fact that there is still this creative energy around and people are prepared to just really go for it. We need something like that, you know, just like throw everything at it but in a very controlled kind of way. I thought it was brilliant.
John: I have to agree. I loved Sinners.
Sarah: Yah! We Agree!
John: Well, that was a potted history of you, Sarah!
Sarah: Yes, it was like a whistle-stop tour of my whole career
……………Laughter………….
John: So what are you going to do here in Avilés?
Sarah: I have two events. One is tomorrow in the Woman’s Centre here.
John: Any specific subject or your work in general?
Sarah: I’m “in conversation”.
John: So like me with you today but with more thoughtful questions…
…..Much laughter….
Sarah: I think it is just going to be about my books but the event on Saturday will be about my more gothic side with The Little Stranger being a haunted house book and that’s going to be the focus. Apart from that I intend to explore Avilés and enjoy the festival.
John: Sarah, it has been an honour and a pleasure to speak to you. I hope you enjoy your time here.
Sarah: Thank you, John, it’s been good to talk. Thanks!
More information about the work of Sarah Waters Click Here
Shots Magazine would like to pass our thanks to Sarah Waters and her Spanish Publishers Anagrama, the organizers of the 14th Celsius 232 Festival, the staff at the Hotel Palacio in Aviles for their hospitality, and especially our thanks to our Spanish Editor John Parker.
An Evening with Sarah Waters, chaired by Caroline Beck
at the 2018 Durham Book Festival
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