AUTHORS: A-E
Victoria Adeniji-West
Victoria has been an avid reader from a young age, often opting for an undercover bedtime reading session over much-needed sleep, and is still the same as an adult. Now, she lives in the Sussex countryside with her husband, young daughter and a somewhat untameable garden, despite her best efforts. She spends her spare time exploring nature, eating cake, singing along to musicals or talking about books. Victoria writes dark, twisty fiction that places diverse characters in thrilling settings. Her short story Love of the Heart was published as part of an anthology in 2020 and her debut was longlisted for the Jericho First 500 award.
Amy Armitage-Reay
Amy has been writing stories since sitting at a wooden picnic table with a pencil and a pad of paper at the age of six years old. An ex-newspaper reporter and llama farmer, her writing often focuses on strong women. Amy lives near Hadrian’s Wall in the Northumberland countryside with her husband, three children, and a variety of pets. She is currently working on her debut novel.
Maxine Barry
Maxine Barry writes contemporary romantic fiction, often set in exotic locations and featuring feisty heroines.
Maxine’s backlist, including Imposters in Paradise, Heart of Fire and The Lying Game, were reissued by Joffe Books.
Ruby Basu
Ruby lives in the beautiful Chilterns with her husband, two children, and the cutest dog in the world. She worked for many years as a lawyer and policy lead in the Civil Service.
As the second of four children, Ruby connected strongly with Little Women’s Jo March and was scribbling down stories from a young age. A huge fan of romantic movies, Star Wars, and Marvel, she loves creating new characters and worlds while waiting for her superpowers to develop.
She is the author of The Twelve Wishes of Christmas and The Love Arrangement published by HQ, and Baby Surprise for the Millionaire and Cinderella’s Forbidden Prince, published by Mills & Boon.
@writerrb01 rubybasu.com instagram/authorrubybasu tiktok/@authorrubybasu
Jennifer Bibby
As a lifelong lover of stories, Jennifer Bibby spent her teenage years writing historical epics before finding her feet exploring the everyday lives of modern women through literature. In addition to being a bibliophile, she loves classy cocktails, cake and medieval history. She’s happiest by the sea and loves to travel, and firmly believes that dinosaurs improve everything. Her debut romance novel The Cornish Hideaway was published in 2022 by Simon & Schuster and was a contender for the 2022 RNA Joan Hessayon award.
Pat Black
Pat Black is the author of several thrillers published by Aries, including The Family, The Beach House, The Runner, The Winter House and The Hunted. To Pay the Ferryman was published by Birlinn in 2025.
He has been published in magazines including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The People’s Friend. He was born and raised in Glasgow but now lives in Yorkshire with his wife and children.
Helen Blair
A BAFTA-nominated Digital Producer, Yorkshire-born Helen Blair grew up in South Wales and moved to London to start a career at the BBC, before settling in Manchester. After more than a decade in the biz, Helen is now freelance and – alongside writing – facilitates courses in journalism, content creation and creative production for broadcasters, social enterprises, universities and arts organisations in the North with the ambition to help the creative industries become more accessible to those from underrepresented backgrounds.
While she has spent most of her career working in the happy world of children’s media, she’s a true crime, thriller and horror addict and embraces her dark side through her writing. Her debut thriller, Paper Cuts, was longlisted for the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Prize in 2023.
When she isn’t torturing fictional characters through a keyboard, she loves exploring faded seaside towns, drinking margaritas, wearing outrageous clothes and chillaxing with her viking husband and pussycat, Elton John.
Nick de Bois
With his wife Helen, Nick divides his time between their home in Hertfordshire and their villa on the Montgo mountain in Spain. After a lifetime in the live events industry, he won election to Parliament in 2010 where he served until 2015. He worked in Downing Street during the frenetic Brexit negotiation, joined TalkRadio as a broadcast host and has written his first book, Confessions of a Recovering MP. With four grown up children from his first marriage and two step children, he is now free to devote much of his time to his first novel.
Anna Britton
Sylvia Broady
Tackling emotional hardships, including family separations, are the seams running through Sylvia Broady’s sagas set in and around the Yorkshire city of Hull. Sylvia has family both in Hull and Australia, and travelling to shores, both near and far, is often on the agenda. Her grandchildren and zest for life keep her young at heart.
Sylvia is the author of The Lost Daughter and Daughter of the Sea, published by Allison & Busby.
Fran Brosan
Educated at Charterhouse and Durham, Fran took up writing after a career in advertising, studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Fran writes fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry, winning the 2022 Dark Skies Poetry Competition and the Florence Staniforth Prize for Short Fiction in 2023.
Her first novel, set against the 1952 Lynmouth Flood Disaster, won the Historical Novel Association 2024 First Chapters award for historical romance and was shortlisted for the 2024 Caledonia Novel Award.
Fran is currently studying for a MA in Creative Non-Fiction at UEA. She continues to write fiction, with a particular focus on relationships between people, and non-fiction.
She lives on the North Norfolk coast and is Co-Founder of the Norfolk Writers Salon. Fran has a husband and four grown-up daughters. She is a keen cold water swimmer and runs to keep herself sane.
Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown (also writing as Morgan Cry) has eleven crime and thriller books published to date, along with a novella and a number of short stories.
Gordon is a founding director of Bloody Scotland, Scotland’s International Crime Writing Festival (www.bloodyscotland.com), a DJ on local radio and also runs a strategic planning consultancy. He lives in Scotland and is married with two children.
In a former life, Gordon delivered pizzas in Toronto, sold non-alcoholic beer in the Middle East, launched a creativity training business, floated a high tech company on the London Stock Exchange, compered the main stage at a two-day music festival and was once booed by 49,000 people while on the pitch at a major football Cup Final.
Heather Burnside
Heather Burnside writes crime thrillers predominantly set in Manchester. She formerly worked in credit control and became a graduate member of The Institute of Credit Management before taking a career break to raise a family. She then completed a creative writing course. During that time, she had a number of articles published in well-known magazines and went on to run a writing services business before focusing on her novels.
To date she has published fourteen novels including The Riverhill Trilogy, The Manchester Trilogy, a five-book series called The Working Girls and three standalone novels entitled Guilt, Blackmail, and Redemption. Many of her books have become Amazon Kindle bestsellers.
Heather works full-time on her novels from her home in Manchester.
Eoin Butler Thornton
Eoin Butler Thornton lives in Galway City, Ireland. He is a project coordinator and writer with an interest in unexplored mythology, folklore and fantasy. He is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at University of Limerick.
Christopher Byford
Through a series of coincidences, Chris Byford decided to give up the world of IT to become a full time author, giving himself the deadline of being published in a year or give up. He narrowly met it.
His Den of Shadows trilogy was picked up by HQ and became Amazon bestsellers, leading to the release of a collection with additional material, as well as a free miscellany of cut chapters in the form of Luck and Other Deadly Things.
He keeps chickens, enjoys astronomy and, when not writing, can usually be found indulging in English fables and legends. Chris lives with his wife and son in Gloucester.
Dennis Carey
Dennis Carey writes contemporary and historical fiction. Though based in Northamptonshire, his writing has a strong Irish influence and provides cause to return to his native Ireland as often as possible.
Alice Castle
Before turning to writing crime fiction, Alice was a feature writer on national newspapers including the Daily Express, The Times and The Daily Telegraph.
She writes the Beth Haldane Mystery cozy crime series as Alice Castle for Bookouture and psychological thrillers for HQ under the name A.M. Castle. Her first thriller, The Perfect Widow, was an Amazon best seller and a top-selling audiobook.
Alice lives in south east London with her two daughters and two cats.
Carryl Church
Originally from the Isle of Wight, Carryl writes historical fiction and is often inspired by familiar locations. She now lives in Devon with her husband, son, and a cat called Ditsy. An early fascination with watching old films led to a career as a Film Archivist, working at the Imperial War Museum and the BBC. Carryl is also an artist and loves experimenting in her sketchbook. When she’s not writing or painting, she’s probably reading, roaming about the countryside or trying not to kill another houseplant.
Carryl is the author of The Forgotten Life of Connie Harris, published by Joffe Books.
A. J. Clack
After university, Ali moved to London to pursue a career in television. She worked on a wide range of shows from Teletubbies to Friends. She now lives in Essex with a houseful of teenagers. When not writing twisty YA thrillers, she can often be found freezing on the side of a rugby pitch.
Joanne Clague
A Yorkshire lass, Jo studied journalism at NCTJ level and relocated to the Isle of Man. She enjoys life by the sea with her partner, children, dogs and wild goats. She works in print, radio and broadcast journalism on the island and in the north west of England. Joanne is the author of the Sheffield Sagas published by Canelo.
Charlotte Cross
Charlotte writes historical fiction, having been fascinated by stories of the past since she was a child. She grew up in southern England in a small town with a rich history, and spent many happy hours at the local museum where her grandmother was a volunteer.
Charlotte now lives in central Scotland with her partner and their opinionated ginger cat. When not writing, she enjoys yoga, reading Victorian novels, and exploring her adopted country. Her debut novel will be published in 2025.
Lucy Cruickshanks
Lucy Cruickshanks’s novels have been shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize, named a Top Ten Book of the Year by The Bookbag, and featured widely in the press.
A great fan of the underdog, she’s drawn to people and places grappling with political instability, writing about societies at their most precarious and fraught with risk.
Lucy is also cofounder of Bookaxe, a startup which uses AI to connect likeminded readers, with users from over 100 countries.
Brid Cummings
Louise Davidson
Anita Davison
Brought up in London and always fascinated by the city’s history, Anita Davison is the author of the Miss Merrill and Aunt Violet historical mysteries, published by Boldwood, and the Flora Maguire Mysteries, an Edwardian Cozy Mystery series set in London and Cheltenham, where Anita now lives.
Rosy Dawson
Rosy is a postgraduate law student living in Birmingham. She studied English Literature at university and has volunteered with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Cambridge Literary Festival over the years. In 2023, she was long-listed for the Women’s Prize Discoveries award and won a Malorie Blackman Creative Writing Scholarship at City Lit.
She has been writing since childhood and is currently working on her debut novel, a feminist thriller in a dark academia setting. When not writing or studying law, Rosy likes swimming, reading and drinking tea.
Tor Dawson
Tor Dawson is a novelist, poet, and writer of both print and digital stories. She completed her doctoral thesis in English and Creative Writing at the University of Southampton writing on World War Two narratives and the psychosocial mechanisms of intergenerational trauma. She has studied at the University of Ulster, the University of Surrey, and The Moscow State Institute for International Relations. In addition to wielding the pen, Tor works as a battlefield guide covering the SOE and resistance in both Paris and Brussels, and also the life and works of writers killed in France during the two world wars. In the past, Tor has been a detective, a lecturer, and a private investigator. Writing under her nom de plume, Victoria L. Humphreys, Tor was a finalist in the Sozopol Global Fiction Seminars for a chapter of her newly published war fiction, The Other Way (Stairwell Books, 2025). She is also the author of Not the Work of an Ordinary Boy (Stairwell Books, 2023), an epistolary novel about World War Two and the Secret Pigeon Service. Born in Surrey, she has lived in Northern Ireland, Canada and Russia, but currently lives in Dorset with her husband, and two children. Since winning the Kate Nash 2024 BookCamp Mentorship competition, Tor has been writing cosy crime and is represented by Kate Nash.
Katie Daysh
Katie Daysh is an author from the Isle of Wight who loves to explore unheard voices in fiction. In her main genre, historical fiction, she enjoys placing queer characters at the heart of the narrative. Her stories are often set on the sea and illuminate themes of friendship, loyalty and mental health issues. Her debut novel, the queer Age of Sail adventure, Leeward, was published through Canelo in 2023, to be followed by two other stories in the trilogy. In her regular life, she works in retail.
Helena Dixon
Helena Dixon writes classic 1930s set cosy crime. She is also a best selling multi-award winning author of romantic fiction as Nell Dixon.
A two time winner of the Romantic Novelist’s RONA Rose award, she has a passion for architecture, history and art. A registered nurse, midwife and health visitor, she works in end of life and advanced dementia care.
Sara Downing
Sara Downing is an award-winning author of several genres, including romance and historical fiction. More recently she has become fascinated with the supernatural. Her first book in this genre, The Lost Boy, was followed up by I Let You Fall, which won the RNA Romantic Novel Awards 2023 in the Fantasy Romantic Novel category.
Sara lives in rural Worcestershire with her husband, three almost grown-up children, a Labrador and a cat. Before children she was a Chartered Accountant, but always knew her dream career lay elsewhere. She started writing in 2009 and hasn’t since yearned to return to the world of accountancy.
Matt Dunn
Matt Dunn is the author of numerous romantic comedy novels, including the bestselling The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook (which was shortlisted for both the Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance), Thirteen Dates (shortlisted for Romantic Comedy Novel of the Year Award), and A Day at the Office (one of Amazon’s Top Editor Picks for 2013, and a #1 bestseller across several categories). He’s also written about life, love, and relationships for various publications including The Times, Guardian, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Company, Elle, and The Sun.
Previously, he’s worked as a professional lifeguard, fitness-equipment salesman, and an I.T. head-hunter (where his success in re-writing other people’s CVs made him think he might have a talent for fiction), but he prefers writing novels for a living so please keep buying his books.
Sarah Dunnakey
Sarah Dunnakey is a writer of long and short fiction. She is a winner of a Northern Writer’s Award for Fiction and the New Writing North Arvon Award. She has had short stories published in anthologies and broadcast on Radio 4. Her debut novel The Companion, a murder mystery set in the 1930s and modern day West Yorkshire, was published by Orion in 2017 and, in November 2024, Avon published Sarah’s The Twelve Murders of Christmas – twelve murderous stories, twenty fiendish puzzles and one final mystery to solve.
When she’s not writing fiction, Sarah writes and verifies questions for several TV quiz shows including Mastermind, University Challenge, Pointless and The Weakest Link. Originally from North Yorkshire and Teeside, Sarah now lives in West Yorkshire.
Lesley Eames
Lesley Eames writes historical sagas set in the early twentieth century. Her awards include the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Elizabeth Goudge Cup and the Festival of Romance’s New Talent Award. Her first book, The Runaway Women in London, was shortlisted in the UK Romantic Novel Awards. She has also sold almost 100 short stories.
Lesley’s previous careers include solicitor, event organiser and Marketing and Fundraising Development Manager for a national charity. In addition to her own writing, she provides mentoring and editing services to other writers.