In 2006 Ann Cleeves was the first winner of the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award of the Crime Writers' Association for Raven Black, the first volume of her Shetland Quartet. She has twice been short listed for a CWA Dagger Award - once for her short story The Plater, and the following year for the Dagger in the Library award.

It came as a revelation that it was possible to get paid for talking to readers about books! She went on to set up reading groups in prisons as part of the Inside Books project, became Cheltenham Literature Festival's first reader-in-residence and still enjoys working with libraries.Īnn Cleeves on stage at the Duncan Lawrie Dagger awards ceremonyĪnn's short film for Border TV, Catching Birds, won a Royal Television Society Award. In the autumn of 2006, Ann and Tim finally achieved their ambition of moving back to the North East.įor the National Year of Reading, Ann was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. The girls have both taken up with Geordie lads.

In 1987 Tim, Ann and their two daughters moved to Northumberland and the north east provides the inspiration for many of her subsequent titles. A couple of these books are seriously dreadful.

Her first series of crime novels features the elderly naturalist, George Palmer-Jones. If a person's not heavily into birds - and Ann isn't - there's not much to do on Hilbre and that was when she started writing. They were the only residents, there was no mains electricity or water and access to the mainland was at low tide across the shore. Soon after they married, Tim was appointed as warden of Hilbre, a tiny tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary. She was attracted less by the ornithology than the bottle of malt whisky she saw in his rucksack when she showed him his room. While she was cooking in the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle, she met her husband Tim, a visiting ornithologist. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs - child care officer, women's refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard - before going back to college and training to be a probation officer. Ann's Shetland series bring us DI Jimmy Perez, investigating in the mysterious, dark, and beautiful Shetland Islands.Īnn grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Ann's DI Vera Stanhope series of books is set in Northumberland and features the well loved detective along with her partner Joe Ashworth. Ann is the author of the books behind ITV's VERA, now in it's third series, and the BBC's SHETLAND, which will be aired in December 2012.

The long call cleeves