Sarah Winman Books in Order

If you want her biggest, warmest novel first: Still Life → A Year of Marvellous Ways
If you want family, childhood, and friendship: When God Was a Rabbit → Still Life
If you want something short and emotionally intense: Tin Man → Still Life
If you want a quieter, healing read: A Year of Marvellous Ways → Tin Man

Sarah Winman was born in Ilford, in Essex, and grew up in Essex, with Cornwall becoming part of her inner map early on after her grandparents moved there when she was four. Those places stayed with her. You can feel them in her fiction, where landscape is never just background.

Before she was known for novels, Winman trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and spent years acting in theatre, film, and television. She appeared across British television over the years, but the page gave her a different kind of freedom. She has said storytelling was always there, first through performance and later on the page. When acting work slowed, she took a writing course, and that change of direction turned into a second career.

She did not arrive at fiction by the tidy route.

Her debut, When God Was a Rabbit, came out in 2011 and found readers quickly. It follows Elly from childhood in England to adulthood, and what makes it stick is not just the plot, but the mix of odd humor, bruised feeling, and fierce attachment between siblings and friends. The book became an international bestseller and won her New Writer of the Year at the Galaxy National Book Awards.

Her second novel, A Year of Marvellous Ways, moved toward postwar Cornwall and an unlikely friendship between an elderly woman and a damaged young soldier. It showed something readers now expect from Winman: a deep affection for people who live a little outside the usual lines, and a belief that kindness can be every bit as dramatic as disaster. Older characters matter in her books. So do second chances.

Then came Tin Man, a short novel that hits hard. Set around Ellis, Michael, and Annie, it looks at love, friendship, secrecy, and grief with unusual plainness. The book was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and many readers still point to it as the Winman novel that broke their heart in the quietest way.

With Still Life, she opened the canvas wider. Beginning in Tuscany in 1944 and moving between London and Florence over decades, the novel brings together soldiers, art historians, bar regulars, friends, lovers, and one memorable parrot. Winman has spoken about wanting joy in this book, not as escapism, but as a real answer to division and narrowness. That helps explain why Still Life feels so roomy and generous, even when it is dealing with war, flood, loneliness, and loss.

Winman has also spoken openly about coming out as a gay woman in the early 1980s, during a hard period for LGBTQ+ people. That history matters in her work. Her novels make room for friendships, loyalties, and improvised households that feel fully lived in, not pushed to the edges.

Across all four novels, certain things return. Chosen families. Queer lives treated as part of ordinary life rather than side notes. Men allowed tenderness, care, and uncertainty. Art, beauty, memory, and the stubborn ways people keep one another afloat. She has also said she does not begin with a plot, and that feels right when you read her, because her books move by human connection first.

Winman lives in London and writes full-time. She still sounds like someone interested less in literary performance than in people, how they talk, how they hide, how they love, and how a place can change the course of a life.