Sarah Waters: Tales of a reluctant celebrity

Sarah Waters doesn't do celebrity. You won't see her tossing her earrings coquettishly on Newsnight Review or writing newspaper articles about her relationship or her hairstyle. For a novelist, she seems remarkably uninterested in freebies.

But this week, the queen of lesbian historical fiction makes a rare public appearance at the Women's Library in London to talk about becoming a writer - her mistakes, false starts and regrets. When her first book, Tipping the Velvet, came out in 1998, it caused a sensation. But 10 publishers turned it down before Virago took it on. She keeps all her rejection letters.

Only after the success of Tipping did she regard herself as a writer. "I had no confidence that I would ever have a reader, which was clearly liberating. In a sense I was writing the kind of book that I wanted to read." Unable to find books with great lesbian sex where the heroine lives to the end, she began her own. Her readership was niche (her close gay friends) but today she is a major crossover author.

Since 1998 Waters has been nominated for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. Her latest novel, The Night Watch, has sold over 200,000 copies in paperback. But she is passionate about new writing. People who have attended her creative writing courses say she is utterly inspirational, although Waters is typically modest. "The idea of living up to people's expectations always terrifies me," she admits. "I try to keep a very low profile."

The trouble is, she makes such good newspaper copy. When there are so few openly lesbian role models, Waters is charming, successful and rich. She is a brand in her own right. No wonder the book trade was startled by her revelation last month that her next novel won't have any gay characters.

But then Waters has never played it straight. She sees herself as a historical novelist first and a lesbian novelist second. Although primarily a literary writer, she is remarkably unsnobbish. She talks passionately about popular culture (Lost, Larry Sanders, The League of Gentlemen) and attributes the "highly coloured, moist textures" of her books to a childhood spent watching Hammer House of Horror.

Although trained as an academic, she finds it "fantastically thrilling" to subvert the historical fiction genre. Her first three books invent a Gothic lesbian underworld that never existed. For The Night Watch, stories of interlinked lives during the London Blitz, she recreates the world of Brief Encounter. "I was taking on that landscape but putting lesbians in it, seeing what then happened to that landscape."

We meet at a café in south London. Waters once joked that she is not "photogenic" enough to be a gay icon. But in person she's remarkably attractive, with flawless skin and delicate features. She sits very upright but one senses a subversive streak.

Although she is clearly a romantic, sex is never drippy in her books; in fact it can be thrillingly brutal. Hands, wrists, thighs are powerfully engaged. She is never coy about the body. The abortion scene in The Night Watch is written like a thriller.

"I never liked that tradition of post-feminist writing which is all celebrating periods and pregnancy," she wrinkles her nose at the memory. "I'm much more interested in the real nuts and bolts of how women experience their bodies. Because that's how I feel I experience my body. I'm continually aware of have I got a blister, do I need to go to the loo, is my bra too tight - really mundane things like that which seem to be really bound up with my femininity. I know men must experience their bodies in similarly impressive ways," she laughs.

Waters lives on the top floor of a Georgian terrace in Kennington, south London. Her partner Lucy, a sub-editor on a television listings magazine, lives in a flat nearby that Waters bought for her. At weekends they co-habit with their cats, their only weakness an addiction to Sky+.

She admits The Night Watch risked alienating her traditional lesbian readership - copy is stripped to the bone and she dropped the intimate first-person narrator. But it's a remarkable book, written backwards - like an emotional detective story. "When you meet a new lover," Waters insists, "what happened in their past is so much more interesting than their future."

The BBC is dramatising the book in three parts. Waters would love Tilda Swinton to play Kay, the dashing ambulance driver, confessing that all the leads represent a different part of her own character. Duncan is immature and moody; Helen, neurotic and jealous (Waters admits she was quite "psychotic with girlfriends in the past"); while Kay is her inner butch, swaggering around picking up women.

Born in 1966, Waters grew up in a family that was far from bookish. "In my house the telly went on as soon as I came home from school." Her mother was a housewife, her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her childhood as very safe and nurturing, but she was a bit of a loner who wrote poems and stories in her room .

A tomboy, she was always attracted to boys until she went to university and fell in love with a woman, which was startling but "fantastically exciting". The relationship lasted six years; the couple lived in a house on the beach at Whitstable, featured in the TV adaptation of Tipping.

Later she moved to Stoke Newington - she jokes that she had the requisite rubbish lesbian haircut and clothes - and began studying for her PhD. She wrote her dissertation on lesbian and gay historical fiction ("brilliant training for a writer"), spending happy hours reading 19th-century pornography with titles such as Lady Flaybum's Academy, which is how she came across the title of her first book, Tipping the Velvet - Victorian slang for cunnilingus.

She assumed it would find a home with an obscure gay press but Virago snapped it up and it was adapted for TV by Andrew Davies, featuring Sapphic love scenes, male impersonators and a giant gold dildo.

One senses a rigour to Waters. She is protective of her writing time (The Night Watch took four years) and loathes blogs: "There's enough to read in the world already, for God's sake." When a book is over she rarely thinks of the characters again, and has zero tolerance for students who bombard her with their dissertations about her novels. "I've been that sort of student, I know how absorbed and excited you get, but I could not be less interested."

Despite reservations about New Labour, she feels Tony Blair's backing for civil partnerships has been brilliant. "I was at the Stonewall Equality dinner where he gave his speech and lots of people there were very emotional. Now there seems to be this cultural ease, though you always worry it's just a trend. Things can be reversed quite quickly. When people feel under pressure they can revert to reactionary positions."

Her next book is set in the late 1940s because she wants to explore how the war shook up the class system. "It was a time of crisis for the middle classes. Suddenly they couldn't find servants." She thinks Britain is still obsessed by class and she is fascinated by people who reinvent themselves. "Coming from a lower-middle-class family and then moving into the middle-class worlds of academia and publishing, I think I have a vested interest in it."

Sarah Waters is in conversation at the Women's Library, London (020 7735 3111), this Friday

Biography: A Welsh winner, in 24 languages

1966: Born Neyland, Pembroke-shire, Wales. BA in English literature from the University of Kent, MA from Lancaster University, PhD from Queen Mary and Westfield College, London.

1998: First novel, Tipping the Velvet, published, winning the Betty Trask Award and the New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award. Later translated into 24 languages, including Chinese, Latvian, Hungarian and Korean.

1999: Second novel, Affinity, wins the Somerset Maugham Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

2002: BBC2 adapts Tipping the Velvet. Fingersmith, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and for the Booker Prize, wins her British Book Awards Author of the Year.

2003: Named one of Granta's 20 Best of Young British Writers. South Bank Award for Literature.

2005: Fingersmith adapted for BBC1, with Sally Hawkins, Elaine Cassidy and Imelda Staunton.

2006: The Night Watch shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange Prize.