Two-time Booker Prize nominee Sarah Waters is the star guest at Liverpool’s Homotopia festival. She talks to Laura Davis

WHEN lesbian bodice ripper Tipping the Velvet landed in British living rooms with some of the raunchiest sex scenes ever seen on TV, there was the usual barrage of complaints.

But, among the letters from scandalised Mary Whitehouse types, there were quite a few protesting the costume drama was not shocking enough.

Behind the controversy was Sarah Waters, rather softly spoken for a woman who brought same sex orgies to the usually tame BBC scheduling in 2002.

Her debut novel was reworked for the screen by Andrew Davies, already known for injecting his adaptations of classic novels with enough zing to get pulses racing.

Despite the initial outcry, the Broadcasting Standards Commission rejected the dozens of complaints while, on the same day, coming down heavily on EastEnders for an excessive case of Mitchell-related violence.

Waters was able to bask in the serial’s warm reception before writing two more novels that would also be turned into BBC dramas and a couple more that have yet to be adapted.

“It felt like a real TV event and I was really pleased with it,” says the Welsh-born writer.

“It was very upbeat, very romantic, very sexy.

“It got lots of really positive attention and felt like the right thing at the right time.” Tipping the Velvet was broadcast nine years after Brookside’s famous lesbian kiss, and a similar time has passed again since.

With two Booker Prize nominations and a host of other awards, Waters, who is appearing at Liverpool’s Homotopia not Homophobia festival on Friday, has helped bring lesbian fiction into the mainstream.

“It’s definitely quite a good time for it in the UK at the moment,” says the 43-year-old.

“A lot of our big writers are out lesbians, whether they’re writing about them or not. I’m thinking of people like Ali Smith or Val McDermid.

“If you were to look at the statistics, the books addressing lesbian issues are always in the minority, but it’s certainly better than it used to be.”

Although the central characters in Waters’s first four novels are gay, what is most interesting is the relationships between the characters and the situations they find themselves in, rather than their sexuality.

Tipping the Velvet (1998) is set in the colourful world of music hall, whereas Affinity (1999) reveals the barren insides of a Victorian women’s prison as well as the mysterious practice of Spiritualism.

Set in the Second World War, The Night Watch (2006) is a fragmented collection of the experiences of different women – one an ambulance driver – which all link together in the end.

By writing about relationships that were considered taboo during the periods in which her books are set, Waters taps into a fresh vein of material.

“I’ve never been on a mission,” says Waters, of being described as a “lesbian author”, “but those stories are at the heart of the novels. Then again, I’ve also tended to write about lesbian life in a way that makes it pretty incidental.

“The books are not really about being lesbian, they’re about betrayal and love and desire and very universal things.”

To create her fictional worlds, Waters immerses herself in books, film and diaries from the era she is recreating.

Tipping the Velvet came about while researching the underworld of Victorian gay culture for her PhD on lesbian and gay fiction, and an idea for her own novel popped into her head.

Affinity and Fingersmith (2002) were set within a couple of decades, but for The Night Watch she had to start her research all over again with a different era, which she also used for her new novel, The Little Stranger.