Sarah Lefanu

Sarah Antoinette LeFanu (born 6 August 1953) is a Scottish author and academic.

Biography Sarah Antoinette LeFanu was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. She worked as an editor for the Women's Press, and taught classes on feminism and science fiction at the City Lit Centre in London.

From 2004 to 2009, LeFanu was artistic director of the Bath Literature Festival.

Publications LeFanu edited the 1985 volume Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind, and in 1988 she published In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction, an analysis of contemporary science-fiction writers, particularly women. Prominent among these were Suzy McKee Charnas, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. Reviewing the volume for Science Fiction Studies, Veronica Hollinger wrote that it was "detailed and wide-ranging, frequently incisive, and always entertaining".

LeFanu and Stephen Hayward co-edited the 1990 anthology Colours of a New Day: Writing for South Africa. The volume was inspired by the international tribute concert to imprisoned anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela on his 70th birthday in 1988.

Her memoir/biography of postcolonial Africa, S Is for Samora: a lexical biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican dream, was published in 2012.

Awards LeFanu was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2025.