Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves is the creator of two of Britain’s most popular detectives, Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez (their cases televised in the Vera and Shetland series), and the recipient of crime writing’s highest awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. She also has an OBE in recognition of her service to libraries; the promotion of reading and public libraries being one aspect of a many-faceted career....

The daughter of a village school master, Ann Cleeves grew up in rural Herefordshire and north Devon, left the West Country to study English at the University of Sussex, but dropped out in her second year and took a variety of jobs, including cook at a bird observatory in Fair Isle and probation officer. She started writing while stuck on a remote bird sanctuary with her ornithologist husband, but it was 20 years before success came with Raven Black, the first Jimmy Perez novel and winner of the Duncan Lawrie Dagger award in 2006.

Now ‘the queen of village noir’, Cleeves was a castaway on Desert Island Discs in 2019 (Bowie’s Life on Mars and Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne were among her recordings). Asked about her writing and her characters, she spoke of people growing out of where they are born and live, emphasizing place and community; and in response to a question about planning her detective fiction, she admitted to not planning anything, memorably describing herself as ‘at the extreme end of the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants brigade’.