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Sarah Perry

(b.1979)

Sarah Perry was born in Essex. She gained a PhD in Creative Writing & the Gothic from Royal Holloway in 2012, having been supervised by Andrew Motion. A winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize & a Royal Holloway doctoral studentship, she was Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone's Library, January 2013. She is currently the UNESCO City of Literature Writer-in-Residence in Prague. She has written for a number of publications including the Guardian, the Independent, Slightly Foxed and the Spectator. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and RTE 1.

Awards: Nibbies (2017) see all

Genres: Historical, Literary Fiction, Horror

New and upcoming books

February 2025

Sweet Nothings

October 2025

Death of an Ordinary Man

Novels

   After Me Comes the Flood (2014)
   The Essex Serpent (2016)
   Melmoth (2018)
   Enlightenment (2024)

Collections

Eight Ghosts (2017) (with others)

Non fiction show

Books containing stories by Sarah Perry

Deadlier (2017)
100 of the Best Crime Stories Written by Women
edited by
Sophie Hannah

Awards

2017 British Book Award Fiction Book of the Year : The Essex Serpent

Award nominations

	2024 Booker Prize (longlist) : Enlightenment
	2017 HWA Gold Crown Award (shortlist) : The Essex Serpent
	2017 Encore Award (nominee) : The Essex Serpent
	2016 Costa Book Award for Best Novel (nominee) : The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry recommends

The Artist (2025)
Lucy Steeds
"Lucy Steeds transports the reader with her sensuous depictions of food, art, and landscape . . . an assured and atmospheric debut about creativity, female agency, and the legacy of war."

The Modern Fairies (2024)
Clare Pollard
"Elegant and decadent, vulgar and clever, enchanting and dark. The love child of Angela Carter and Anaïs Nin--the book I really, really needed."

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa (2023)
Stephen Buoro
"Fascinating; unashamedly, brilliantly intelligent. It grapples with ideas around maths, Afrofuturism, biblical myth . . . profound philosophical stuff, but fundamentally it's a really playful, pleasurable book about young boy who's falling madly in love, and has a difficult, intense, loving relationship with his mother."

The Key in the Lock (2022)
Beth Underdown
"A gifted storyteller."

Burntcoat (2021)
Sarah Hall
"I loved and needed this full-throated yell of a novel about female desire, resilience, strangeness and artistic power, about the amplification of that power through suffering, and about the terror and beauty of bodies in extremis. Nobody writes like Sarah Hall, and here her lucid, vital, extraordinary style is matched perfectly to its subject - it's an extraordinary work that will stand as a blazing witness to the age that bore it."

The House Guest (2021)
Charlotte Northedge
"This is ace. Very acute on class, aspiration, women and status and all those agonising negotiations and anxieties."

The Divines (2021)
Ellie Eaton
"A terrific, entertaining, and astute work and one of considerable relevance to the way we live now."

The House on Vesper Sands (2018)
(Inspector Henry Cutter and Sergeant Gideon Bliss, book 1)
Paraic O'Donnell
"The most vivid and compelling portrait of late Victorian London since The Crimson Petal and the White."

Confessions of the Fox (2018)
Jordy Rosenberg
"Confessions of the Fox is quite simply extraordinary. Imagine if Maggie Nelson, Daphne du Maurier, and Daniel Defoe collaborated? That."

I Still Dream (2018)
J P Smythe
"A strikingly intelligent book about intelligence itself."

Almost Love (2018)
Louise O'Neill
"With a pen sharp as needles, the author unpicks the kind of obsessive love to which nobody is immune: I would challenge any reader to turn the final page without having flushed, at least once, in recognition. Her gaze is unflinching but never cruel; we are invited to examine, but never judge. O'Neill is a vital and necessary presence in contemporary literature, and we are lucky to have her."

The Sealwoman's Gift (2018)
Sally Magnusson
"A remarkable feat of imagination."

Strange Magic (2017)
(Essex Witch Museum Mystery, book 1)
Syd Moore
"I gleefully submitted to this tale of witchcraft, feminism, mysterious strangers, historical atrocities, plucky heroines and ghastly apparitions - and came away more proud than ever to be an Essex girl. STRANGE MAGIC is the rarest of things: a book which sets out unashamedly to entertain, and does so with wit, style and erudition."

The Binding Song (2017)
Elodie Harper
"A wonderful new arrival in the 'Norfolk Noir' genre, this deliciously gripping novel casts the familiar setting of Norwich and its surroundings in a grim and haunting new light."

Attrib.: And Other Stories (2017)
Eley Williams
"he is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own."

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