Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry is a British novelist and essayist whose richly atmospheric fiction draws on the Gothic tradition while exploring science, faith, and the natural world. Born in Chelmsford, Essex, in 1979, she grew up in a strict Baptist household, studied Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia. Perry's breakthrough novel The Essex Serpent became a Sunday Times bestseller, won the Waterstones Book of the Year and the British Book Awards Book of the Year, and was adapted into an Apple TV+ series. Set in 1893, it follows a newly widowed woman who becomes obsessed with reports of a mythical creature in the Essex marshes, weaving together science, religion, and desire. Her other novels include After Me Comes the Flood, Melmoth, and Enlightenment, each combining literary ambition with Gothic atmosphere and intellectual depth. Perry's writing is celebrated for its gorgeous prose, its engagement with ideas, and its evocation of landscape. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers literary fiction with a Gothic sensibility — stories where the natural world is strange and wondrous, and the boundary between reason and superstition is never quite as clear as it seems.