Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves is a British crime writer, born on 24 October 1954 in Herefordshire. Before she turned to fiction she worked as a cook at the Fair Isle bird observatory, then as a coastguard, a probation officer and a library outreach worker. She began with the Palmer-Jones novels in 1986 and went on to create four detectives: Inspector Ramsay, Vera Stanhope (from The Crow Trap, 1999), Jimmy Perez in the Shetland books (from Raven Black, 2006) and Matthew Venn in the Two Rivers series (from The Long Call, 2019). Raven Black won the CWA Gold Dagger, and she received the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2017. Both Vera and Shetland have been adapted for television.