[2] Seiffert has published five works of fiction to date: The Dark Room (2001) is a novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize[3] and the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, winner of the LA Times Prize for First Fiction and a Betty Trask Award in 2002.
[5] Field Study (2004) is a collection of short stories, one of which received an award from International PEN.
Seiffert was named as one of Granta magazine's 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, and her short story "Field Study" was included in the subsequent collection.
Seiffert's subject is the individual in history: how political and economic upheavals impact on ordinary lives.
Her characters have included the 12-year-old daughter of an SS officer in 1945, a Polish seasonal worker on a German asparagus farm after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a London painter and decorator who killed a civilian as a 19-year-old squaddie with the British Army in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.