Sarah Williams

Sarah Williams has published books under two different names, each marking a different phase of her writing career.

As Sarah Matthews, she published reviews of books and of 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 have developed in recent years, she has 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), the second edition of which was published in 2025. Most recently, she has moved from writing information books to becoming a crime fiction author under the name SW Williams. Her debut crime fiction novel, Small Deaths, was published in 2017 by Crime Scene Books. Now, as Sarah Williams, she is working on two very different kinds of books – one a historical detective series, the other a psychological thriller.

Throughout her writing career, Sarah 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.

Sarah Williams has been a professional writer since her early twenties, translating from the French and writing information books for young children and textbooks for schools. She is a trained teacher with a PGCE from Oxford University and has written and run courses on creative writing in general and crime fiction in particular. Working with Writing for Life participants brings everything together – her love of writing, her belief in the primacy of effective communication, and her delight in shared learning.