Writing Crime Fiction with Emma Styles, Bridget Walsh and Elspeth Latimer

We're teaming up with Emma Styles, Bridget Walsh and Elspeth Latimer for this panel on Writing Crime Fiction to celebrate National Crime Reading Month!

About Emma Styles:

Emma writes Australian crime fiction about young women taking on the patriarchy. Her debut novel, No Country for Girls, won the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and the Little, Brown UEA Crime Fiction Award. It was a New Blood selection at Theakston’s Crime in Harrogate and was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger, the Davitt Award for Best Adult Crime Novel and the ACWA Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction. The Shark is her second standalone thriller.

Emma grew up near the beach on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Perth, Western Australia and now lives on the south coast of the UK. She’s worked as a veterinarian in country and coastal Australia and the UK, and spent her teens and twenties learning to ski, snowboard, ride horses and motorcycles, and fly small aeroplanes. She loves wild swimming, is less afraid of great white sharks than she should be, and hopeless at surfing.

About Bridget Walsh:

Bridget was born in London to Irish immigrant parents. She studied English literature and was an English teacher for 23 years, before leaving the profession to pursue her writing. Bridget lives in Norwich with her husband, Micky, and her two dogs.

The manuscript of Bridget's debut novel, THE TUMBLING GIRL, written on the MA Creative Writing (Crime Fiction) course at UEA, won the 2024 HWA Debut Crown Award and the UEA Little, Brown Award for Crime Fiction in 2019. It also made the shortlist for the CWA ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2024. She has completed the second title in the Minnie Ward and Albert Easterbrook series, THE INNOCENTS. THE TUMBLING GIRL was published by Gallic Books in May 2023, with THE INNOCENTS following in 2024.

Pushkin Press will publish the third instalment, THE SPIRIT GUIDE, in April 2026.

About Elspeth Latimer:

Elspeth studied Architecture at Cambridge University and spent a year in Italy after winning the Rome Prize. Her love of reading prompted her to start writing and she completed an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, followed by a PhD on crime series. Her research has been published in the UK and USA, and she has worked part-time as a creative-writing tutor.

For the past two decades Elspeth and her family have lived in the Brecks, an area at the heart of East Anglia. The subtle beauty of this landscape together with the realities of contemporary rural life inspired her to write The Lost Detective, a crime novel about M**der, a missing baby, and overcoming loss.

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