Nights at the Circus
Angela Carter (1940–92) read English at Bristol University and was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University in 1976–8. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), among others. Nights at the Circus won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She also published several collections of short stories, beginning with Fireworks (1974), as well as The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), and two collections of journalism, Nothing Sacred (1982) and Expletives Deleted (1992). Her short story collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories was published by The Folio Society in 2011, and one of the stories, ’The Company of Wolves’, became an award-winning film directed by Neil Jordan.
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has written six novels, including Tipping the Velvet (1998), which won the Betty Trask Award, and Fingersmith (2002), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; both of these novels were later adapted into multi-award-winning series by the BBC. She co-wrote with Christopher Green a stage adaptation of the lost 1928 supernatural murder-mystery novel The Frozen Scream, which premiered in December 2014.