Author: festival

Ann Cleeves grew up in Herefordshire and Devon, and trained as a probation officer.
She began writing whilst living with her husband on a tiny island in the Dee estuary, where Tim had been appointed warden for the nature reserve.
Ann’s list of achievements and awards is incredibly long, but perhaps she is best known as the author of the phenomally-successful Shetland and Vera Stanhope novels, both of which have been adapted for TV.
She is a passionate champion for public libraries, and she went on to set up reading groups in prisons as part of the ‘Inside Books’ project, and became Cheltenham Literature Festival’s first reader-in-residence.

Alan Johnson was born in May 1950. He is a British Labour Party politician who served as Home Secretary from June 2009 to May 2010. Before that he filled a wide variety of cabinet positions in both the Blair and Brown governments, including Health Secretary and Education Secretary. Until 20 January 2011 he was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Johnson was the Member of Parliament for Hull West and Hessle until his retirement from politics in 2017.

Janet Ellis is an English television presenter, actress and writer, who is perhaps best known for presenting the BBC children’s television programmes Blue Peter and Jigsaw between 1979 and 1987.

In 2016, she published her first novel, the acclaimed The Butcher’s Hook.
This year, she has published her second novel, How It Was.

Vaseem Khan was born in London, and studied at the London School of Economics, gaining a degree in Accounting and Finance. After working for a number of years in India as a Management Consultant, he returned to the UK in 2006 to work at the University College London for the Department of Security and Crime Science.