Author Birthday – 24 October – Ann Cleeves
Happy Birthday, Ann Cleeves, born on 24 October 1954.
Ann Cleeves Quotes
- Don’t write for the market. You won’t enjoy it, the readers will be able to tell you’re not really engaged, and anyway the trend in publishing will have changed before the book is ready to go out into the world.
- Read a lot.
- Finish the book before you start editing and polishing. It’s very tempting to tweak material already written, but much better to get the framework in place first.
- I write like a reader, without any planning. I have to write the next scene to know where the story is going.
- [I get my greatest ideas] By listening to other people. That’s what I’ve missed most during the pandemic: the overheard conversations in trains or restaurants. Places often trigger ideas for books too.
Read our interview with Ann Cleeves.
Ann Cleeves is a British author of crime fiction. She has written 30 novels in 30 years, and is the creator of detectives Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez. The Vera Stanhope Novels have been dramatised as the TV detective series Vera, and the Jimmy Perez Shetland novels as the series Shetland. Her latest novels include The Heron’s Cry, The Raging Storm, and The Dying Light featuring Detective Matthew Venn, and The Killing Stones. In 2006 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 series. She has been short listed for a CWA Dagger Award – once for her short story ‘The Plater’, and twice for the Dagger in the Library award, which is awarded for an author’s entire body of work. On 26 October 2017, Ann was presented with the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honour in British crime writing. Cleeves was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours. Follow her on Bluesky.
Source for photograph: David Hirst (via author’s publishers)
by Amanda Patterson
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