Nairn Book & Arts Festival

Denise Mina took a variety of low-skilled jobs before attending university, taking a PhD and teaching criminology and criminal law at Strathclyde University, when she wrote her first novel Garnethill which won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel. Since then she has written two plays and a number of graphic and crime novels including the Garnethill and Paddy Meehan trilogies.  Allan Guthrie is a crime novelist from Edinburgh, whose debut novel won the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year.  His latest novel is the prison-set Slammer, about which The Scotsman said, ‘he nails a universal truth about the nature of life and about the way we differentiate good and bad, sanity and madness.’