Sarah Williams

S. W. Williams has published books under three different names, each of which marks a different phase of her writing career.

As Sarah Matthews, she published reviews of books of and on poetry, translations from the French, mainly of books on history or the history of ideas — among them Fernand Braudel’s On History (Blackwell), shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, and Alain Besançon’s The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (Blackwell). She also published a great number of children’s information books under the Moonlight Publishing imprint, and a range of school textbooks and school editions of classic writers such as Mark Twain and Conan Doyle for Stanley Thornes, Heinemann and Pearsons.

As her interests developed in recent years, she found herself focusing more and more on crime fiction, and in 2015, writing as Sarah Williams, was commissioned to write How to Write Crime Fiction (Robinson).

Most recently, she has moved from being a writer of information books to becoming a crime fiction author, under the name S. W. Williams. Her debut crime fiction novel, Small Deaths, was published in 2017 by Crime Scene Books. Currently she is working on a psychological crime thriller series featuring a community psychiatric nurse. The first title in the series is It Should Have Been You.

Throughout her writing career, S. W. Williams has been committed to exploring the art and craft of writing well, through textbooks such as Making Texts Work, through teaching in schools and for the Open University, and through running creative writing courses.