About Val

“Everyone told me that it was impossible to make a living from writing, that I needed to have a proper job. I knew I wasn’t that sort of person.”

Young Val

I grew up in Kirkcaldy on the East Coast of Scotland, a small town famous for producing linoleum and for being the birthplace of the economist Adam Smith. It was at the heart of the Fife coalfield, and I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents in the mining village of East Wemyss.

Val At University

To everyone’s amazement, including mine, I was accepted to read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford – at 17, one of the youngest undergraduates they’d ever taken on, and the first from a Scottish state school.

I survived the culture shock of arriving in a place where no-one understood a word I said, and seized every experience I could get my hands on.

Young Journalist

I had always wanted to write, ever since I realised that real people actually produced all those books in the library. But everyone told me that it was impossible to make a living from writing, that I needed to have a proper job. I knew I wasn’t the sort of person who would be suited to a proper, nine to five job with a neat hierarchical career structure, so I became a journalist.

I spent two years training in Devon, winning a clutch of awards, including Trainee Journalist of the Year, then for fourteen years I worked on national newspapers in Glasgow and Manchester, ending up as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid – a title that sounds far grander than the reality, I should confess.

Becoming A Writer

Meanwhile, I was attempting to become a writer. I wrote my first attempt at a novel when I was working in Devon. The best thing I can say about it was that I actually finished it. It was a typical 21-year-old’s novel – full of tortured human relationships, love, hate, grief, angst, not to mention the meaning of life. It was, naturally enough, rejected by every publishing house in London. But an actor friend who read it thought it would make a good play.

So I turned it into a script and showed it to the director of the Plymouth Theatre Company. And he decided it would fit perfectly a season he had planned of new plays by new writers. So there I was, at 23 a performed playwright. It wasn’t what I had intended, but I was happy with it. I later adapted the play, Like A Happy Ending, for BBC radio. And I was commissioned to write another play, this time for a touring company in Lincolnshire and Humberside.

Giving Up The Day Job

I didn’t have the practical skills to make a success of writing drama, and the agent I had then didn’t do anything to help me acquire them. In fact, he fired me because I didn’t make him enough money. (so who’s got the last laugh now?) So I decided to turn my hand to writing a crime novel, because I’d always enjoyed reading the genre, and I’d been very excited by the New Wave of American women crime writers, who made me wonder if I could write something similar with a UK setting.

I started writing Report for Murder in 1984, and it was published by The Women’s Press in 1987. The rest is history… I finally gave up the day job in April, 1991, and I’ve been making my living by writing ever since. I was the Manchester Evening News‘ crime reviewer for four years, and I still review regularly for various national newspapers. I also write occasional journalism and broadcast regularly on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.

Val McDermid Biography

One of the UK’s most accomplished and respected novelists, Val McDermid has sold over 19 million books to date across the globe and her work has been translated into more than 40 languages. She has written five series: cold case detective Karen Pirie was introduced to us in The Distant Echo and the 8^th book in the series will be published in 2025, with Karen now starring in a major ITV series; clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan lead a gripping eleven book series adapted for television as Wire in the Blood, starring Robson Green and Hermione Norris; the Kate Brannigan novels showcase a private detective; journalist Lindsay Gordon is at the heart of another series; and most recently, Val has launched a new series featuring young journalist Allie Burns whose life and experiences we witness at ten year intervals, debuting with 1979 1989. Val has also published several award-winning standalone novels, books of non-fiction, short story collections and a children’s picture book, My Granny is a Pirate. Val returned to Karen Pirie with her 2023 hardback, Past Lying, which was published in October of that year. 2024 saw the publication of Queen Macbeth, her reimagining of the story of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, in May. Her new Karen Pirie novel, Silent Bones, publishes in October 2025.

Val is recognised as a remarkably versatile writer for stage, microphone and screen as well as books. In early 2017 Val’s BBC Radio 4 drama series, Resistance, aired to great acclaim, and has been adapted as a graphic novel. BBC Radio 4 has also broadcast five series of her comedy crime ‘Dead’ serial, starring Julie Hesmondhalgh. And in the last couple of years, she has returned to writing for the theatre with Margaret Saves Scotland as well as creating the original TV series Traces based on her original idea and starring Molly Windsor and Martin Compston, which completed two series, airing on primetime BBC One slots, in 2021 and 2022.

Val has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, the Grand Prix des Romans D’Aventure, the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award, the Stonewall Writer of the Year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. Uniquely, she has been shortlisted in five different categories in the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards. In 2016 she received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award at the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Harrogate Crime Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for both the Man Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was the Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She co-founded the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate (now the largest of its kind in Europe) in 2003. She has participated in innumerable festivals on five continents and she plays an active role in Scottish civic society.

She is the recipient of seven Honorary Doctorates, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford and Professor of Scottish Studies and Crime Fiction at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She is Patron of the Scottish Book Trust and founding sponsor of McDermid Ladies football team.

Val is also an experienced broadcaster with regular and hugely popular appearances on TV and radio. Val has guest edited BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, fronted features for BBC Two’s The Culture Show, written and presented many radio documentaries and appeared on a remarkable range of TV shows from Question Time to Have I Got News For You. She further added to her broadcasting credentials in late 2016 by captaining the winning University Challenge alumnae team, having previously become Celebrity Mastermind champion! She has also been a member of winning teams in Eggheads and Only Connect Sport Relief.

Val was born in Kirkcaldy, a coastal town in the heart of the Scottish mining community. She graduated in English from St Hilda’s College, Oxford – the first student from a Scottish state school to do so – before going on to be an award winning journalist for sixteen years. Val is also lead singer of the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a rock band who have performed at Glastonbury as well as many book festivals. Her civil partner is Professor Jo Sharp, the Geographer Royal for Scotland. Together they edited Imagine a Country, a collection of more than 100 short essays with the aim of fostering debate and discussion. They divide their time between Edinburgh and the East Neuk of Fife.