Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves is an English crime writer whose atmospheric, character-driven procedurals are rooted in remote, weather-beaten landscapes she has often lived in herself. Early jobs cooking at a Fair Isle bird observatory and, later, years spent on the tidal, no-electricity Hilbre Island fed directly into her fiction. She found her breakthrough with Vera Stanhope, the blunt, rumpled Northumberland detective introduced in The Crow Trap (1999), and followed it with the Shetland series, begun with the Gold Dagger-winning Raven Black (2006). In 2019 she launched a third series, Two Rivers, set in North Devon around DI Matthew Venn. All three series have found major television audiences. Vera starred Brenda Blethyn for fourteen series on ITV before concluding in 2025; Shetland has run across multiple BBC series, first with Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez and, since his departure, Ashley Jensen as DI Ruth Calder; and Two Rivers began its screen life as The Long Call in 2021. New readers can start with any of the three leads — The Crow Trap for Vera's slow-burn introduction, Raven Black for the bleaker Shetland atmosphere, or The Long Call for her newest detective — since the series share no characters or continuity. Cleeves continues to publish new entries in all three and was awarded the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2017 and an OBE in 2022 for services to reading and libraries.