PROFILE – M. W. Craven arrives at this year’s East Riding Festival of Words as one of the most prominent names on the programme, and fittingly he will be opening the festival’s much-anticipated Crime Day. Born in Carlisle and raised in Newcastle, Craven’s route into writing was circuitous and distinctive. At sixteen he joined the British Army as an armourer, a career that took him across the world before he returned to Britain to study social work, specialising in criminology and psychology. He spent over a decade and a half in the probation service, rising to assistant chief executive in Cumbria, before leaving to write full-time.
Craven is best known for his Washington Poe novels, a series that has become a mainstay of contemporary British crime writing. Poe, taciturn and uncompromising, lives alone on the Cumbrian fells, pulled reluctantly into cases that test both his instincts and his conscience. He is paired with the awkward brilliance of civilian analyst Tilly Bradshaw and the steadiness of DI Stephanie Flynn, forming one of the most engaging investigative teams in recent crime fiction. The books have drawn praise for their intricate plotting, the uneasy wit that underpins the character relationships, and the vivid sense of place. The series began with The Puppet Show, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and has continued through Black Summer, The Curator, Dead Ground and The Botanist to this year’s The Final Vow, which has already secured a place in the Sunday Times Top Ten.
Praise for The Final Vow
‘Washington Poe is a brilliant creation from one of the finest and most inventive crime writers of today’ Peter James
‘I’ve been following M.W. Craven’s Poe/Tilly series from the very beginning, and it just gets better and better ‘ Peter Robinson
‘Mesmerising, macabre and magnificent. Poe and Tilly are unstoppable’ Chris Whitaker
Craven’s work has now been translated into more than two dozen languages and has won him the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and, most recently, the Capital Crime Fingerprint Award. He has also begun a parallel series set in the United States featuring former marshal Ben Koenig, already optioned for television, but it is Poe who remains at the heart of his writing and at the centre of his international reputation.
That reputation will be front and centre when he takes the stage in Beverley to launch the festival’s Crime Day. In a programme that brings together some of the sharpest voices in thrillers and detective fiction, it is Craven who will set the tone: a writer whose prose is as taut as the crimes it depicts, and whose lived experience in the justice system lends his novels a rare authenticity. For readers drawn to the shadows where law and morality blur, his appearance at the Festival of Words is likely to be one of the highlights of the season.
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