Alis Hawkins

A three times CWA Historical Dagger shortlisted, and longlisted Gold Dagger author, Alis Hawkins grew up on a dairy farm in Cardiganshire. After three years reading English at Oxford she trained as a Speech and Language Therapist and has spent the subsequent three and a half decades variously working in a burger restaurant, bringing up two sons, working with homeless people and helping families to understand their autistic children. And writing. Always. Nonfiction (autism related), plays (commissioned for production in heritage locations) and, of course, novels.

Initially fascinated by the medieval period, she began her crime and mystery career at Pan Macmillan with a historical novel set during the fourteenth century then fast-forwarded to West Wales in the nineteenth century to fulfill a long-held desire to write a book based on Wales’s best kept historical secret: the Rebecca Riots. The resulting Teifi Valley Coroner series featuring blind investigator Harry Probert-Lloyd and his chippy assistant, John Davies has twice been shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Historical Dagger.

Her current series, The Oxford Mysteries, features young Welsh polymath and nonconformist rebel, Rhiannon ‘Non’ Vaughan and her partner in (solving) crime Basil Rice, an Oxford don with a dangerous secret. The first in the series – A Bitter Remedy – was shortlisted for the CWA’s Historical Dagger and longlisted for the Gold Dagger.

Now living with her partner on the Welsh/English border, Alis speaks Welsh, collects rucksacks and can’t resist an interesting fact.