Val McDermid

Nominated Title: "The Distant Echo"
Other Titles: Too numerous to mention, but include "Dead Beat" "Kick Back" "The Wire In The Blood" and "The Mermaids Singing"
Publisher: Harper Collins

Life is filled with as many twists of fate as any good thriller. Val McDermid wrote a novel and had it turned into a play quite by accident, adapted some others for radio and then was promptly fired by her then agent for not making him enough money. Yeah, and Mister Epstein, the days of bands with guitars are numbered!

Oh the vagaries of fate.

Val McDermid is one the nation's foremost, respected and most popular authors, with a proud back catalogue of best selling novels that outweigh just about everybody else in her field.

Report For Murder was published in 1987 and Val has never looked back. With many of her novels being adapted for TV - the most notable of which, Wire In The Blood, stars Robson Green and Hermione Norris as psychologist Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan - she now has 21 novels to her name, reports regularly for national newspapers and is a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4 programs.

Not bad for a girl brought up in a town made famous for producing lino.

Val is also a keen enthusiast of the short story and became Editor of the Save Our Short Story Campaign which aimed to give the short story a higher prestige and profile. So popular was the campaign, that the anthology attracted contributions from authors of the standing of Stella Duffy and Finn Clark.

She has a son and divides her time between Manchester and Northumberland.

www.valmcdermid.com