Sarah Perry is the internationally best-selling author of the novels After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent, Melmoth, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She won the Waterstone’s Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award 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. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has a PhD in Creative Writing. Her latest novel, Enlightenment, was long listed for the Booker Prize and has been hailed by the Financial Times as ‘A rich, surprising book that dazzles and dizzies the reader ... though firmly placed in Perry's homeland of Essex, it's a book with cosmic reach’.

Photo: Sophie Davidson