Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves is a British crime writer known for the Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez, and Matthew Venn series. She is best known for Raven Black (2006), which won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger, and for the TV series Vera and Shetland. Her honours include the CWA Diamond Dagger and an OBE for services to reading and libraries.

Ann Cleeves was born in 1954 and grew up in rural Herefordshire and North Devon. Her father worked as a village school teacher. She attended the University of Sussex to study English but left before graduating. She then worked in several temporary roles, including child care officer, women’s refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard, and probation officer.

Her writing life began on Fair Isle, where she worked as a cook at the bird observatory. There she met her future husband, Tim, an ornithologist. She later said she noticed “the bottle of malt whisky” in his rucksack when she showed him his room. After their marriage, Tim became warden of Hilbre, a small tidal island in the Dee Estuary. With no mains power or water and few distractions, Cleeves began to write. Her first crime novels featured the naturalist George Palmer-Jones.

In 1987, the family moved to Northumberland. The region shaped much of her later fiction, including the Vera Stanhope and Shetland novels. She continued to work in roles linked to reading and community life. During the National Year of Reading, she was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. She later helped set up reading groups in prisons and worked with libraries across the country.

Her career grew steadily. Raven Black, the first Shetland novel, won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger in 2006. She later received the Iceland Noir Honorary Award for services to crime fiction and the CWA Diamond Dagger in 2017. She also gained honorary doctorates from the University of Sunderland, Robert Gordon University, and the University of Liverpool. In the 2022 New Year Honours, she was appointed OBE.

Cleeves’ work has been widely translated and adapted. Vera ran for fourteen series on ITV until 2025. Shetland ran for nine series on the BBC. The Long Call was adapted in 2021. She has spoken often about the importance of libraries, saying, “Libraries matter… if we believe in equality of opportunity, we must fight for them.”

Her husband Tim died in 2017. Cleeves lives in Whitley Bay and has two daughters. Her latest book is The Dark Wives (2024), the eleventh in the Vera Stanhope series.

Photo credit: www.anncleeves.com