Morag Joss

Morag Joss began writing in 1996 when her first short story won an award in a national competition. Starting to write was, she says, ‘discovering a lifelong ambition I didn’t know I had’. Her first three novels were whodunnits, the first of which Funeral Music was nominated for a Dilys award by the USA Independent Booksellers’ Association. Later awards include the Crime Writers’ Association silver dagger for Half Broken Things (later adapted as a television film starring Penelope Wilton) and an Edgar Allen Poe best novel nomination for The Night Following.

In 2008 she was Heinrich Böll writer-in-residence on Achill Island, Ireland, and in 2009 her television play Famous Last, starring Pauline Collins, was broadcast on Sky Arts. In 2010 her seventh novel Among the Missing (published in the UK as Across the Bridge) was published to outstanding reviews. Her stories have appeared in anthologies and her most recent ‘It May be Lalique’ was commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 to celebrate International Women’s Day in 2012.  Her latest novel Our Picnics in the Sun was published in 2013.

Morag teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and Oxford University. She was recently awarded a doctorate in creative writing by Oxford Brookes University. She lives in rural Hampshire and when she isn’t working likes to cook, swim, walk, go to the theatre, and listen to music ranging from Bach to the Proclaimers, too often joining in.