Sarah Perry is the internationally best-selling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is the winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Awards and the British Book Awards, and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. Her essays have been widely published, and she has contributed to the Guardian, the New York Times, the Observer, and the London Review of Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has a PhD in Creative Writing, and has been a UNESCO City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague, and a Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library and the Savoy Hotel in London.

Her latest novel Enlightenment is published by Jonathan Cape and is longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.