Lesley Grant-Adamson

Lesley Grant-Adamson is an acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and teacher of creative writing. She was a journalist who gave up her job (as a feature writer on the Guardian in London) to write fiction. Her first two novels Patterns in the Dust and The Face of Death (Faber, 1985) brought her international success with the classic English detective story and the psychological suspense novel.

Patterns in the Dust was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey award for first crime novels. Like several of her early novels, it featured newspaper folk and their ailing industry. She wrote a further 14 crime novels of various types, while reviewers credited her with ‘turning the genre into an art form’. Her short stories have been read on BBC Radio 4, Radio 3 and Classic FM. They have appeared in magazines, literary journals and anthologies.

Lesley has taught novel-writing at the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd. Her success as a teacher, and her wide experience of writing crime fiction, led to a commission for Writing Crime and Suspense Fiction (Hodder, 1996) and the updated Writing Crime Fiction (Hodder, 2003). After her RLF fellowships she taught a City University evening class in writing crime fiction.She now tutors writers individually, from her home in Suffolk where she lives with her husband Andrew. They once wrote a book together. A Season in Spain (Pavilion, 1994) is a portrait of the Alpujarra region of Andalusia where they lived for two years.