Sarah Moss

Sarah Moss FRSL (born 1975) is an English writer and academic. She has published eight novels and two memoirs, as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. A ninth novel, Ripeness, was published in 2025. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize. She was appointed assistant professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin's School of English, Drama and Film in the Republic of Ireland with effect from September 2020. She is a regular contributor to the Irish Times.

Biography Sarah Moss was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the age of two moved with her family to Manchester, England,

Ghost Wall Moss published Ghost Wall in 2018, a novel that was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and Ondaatje Prize, and longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2019.

Moss creates a motif of light at the outset of her Ondaatje Prize-nominated text, Ghost Wall, as a female character is brought out, "not blindfolded", but with her "eyes widened" to "the last light" of the day and also quite possibly of her life. This foreshadowing narrative at the outset is an historic representation of a social evil that occurred in medieval England many centuries ago among those communities that practised human sacrifice.

As the novel continues, we meet the Hampton family, who are involved in a re-enactment of life in northern England 2500 years ago, while the insidious influence of the racist and sexist Englishman Bill Hampton upon his wife Alison and his smart, seventeen-year-old daughter Silvie is slowly revealed.

This text is intended to "shake up" the reader with its presentation of the nefarious role that personal power politics plays in domestic abuse, a highly pertinent theme for today.

The Independent called the novel "inventive, intelligent, and like no other author's work".

Awards and honours Moss's 2011 novel Night Waking won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.

Moss was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2019.