Photo: Jefferson Studios
Sarah was born on the east coast of Scotland, was brought up there and in East Africa, and now lives in the West Country. In the 1980s and 1990s she was Senior Editor at The Women’s Press, where she was responsible for their innovative and highly-regarded science fiction list.
They published many of the American feminist dystopian/utopian classics of the 1970s, such as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, important antecedents (along with British works such as Esmé Dodderidge’s The New Gulliver and Zoë Fairbairns’s Virago-published Benefits) of the current resurgence of feminist dystopian fiction.
From 2004 to 2009 Sarah was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She frequently chairs events for Bristol Ideas and the Bristol Women’s Literature Festival.
She blogs about films at: www.filmwatchingwomen.wordpress.com and studies Chen-style Tai Chi with the Bristol School of Tai Chi. Click here to read ‘Evening Class’, her Tai Chi-themed short story (broadcast on BBC R4). You can spot her now and again – and her son Alex – in these three introductory videos on the Bristol School of Tai Chi website: http://www.bristoltaichi.com/video.htm
For the last twenty years Sarah has volunteered once a week with RDA (Riding for the Disabled Association).
For an overview of Sarah’s work by writer and broadcaster Bidisha, please see: ‘Sarah LeFanu: The Writer who Travelled from Outer Space to Mozambique via Bath’.
Sarah LeFanu 