Val McDermid - Queen Macbeth

Val McDermid Author

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into forty languages, and have sold over nineteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford and a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She writes full time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.

Nicola Meighan Chair

Arts writer and broadcaster Nicola Meighan has interviewed names like Dolly Parton, Joan Collins, Martha Reeves, Judas Priest and Russell Crowe on her BBC Radio Scotland show (Friday Afternoons, 2-4pm), along with contributions to Radio 4, 6 Music, STV, The Herald, The List, Mojo, the Quietus and more. She's also worked at Monorail Music, the Arches, The Tron theatre, Triptych festival (Grace Jones, Herbie Hancock, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Candi Staton), and with artists including Nick Cave, Goldfrapp and Depeche Mode at Mute Records. A Kick Up The Arts is her Scottish Arts and Culture podcast.