Bio

Picture: Mark Bothwell

David Hewson’s novels have been translated into a wide range of languages, from Italian to Japanese, and his debut work, Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino. The Garden of Evil, which appeared in January 2008, is his thirteenth published novel.

David was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough. Eight years later he was a staff reporter on The Times in London, covering news, business and latterly working as arts correspondent. He worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction.

Semana Santa won the WH Smith Fresh Talent award for one of the best debut novels of the year in 1996 and was later made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino and Olivier Martinez. Four standalone works followed before A Season for the Dead, the first in a series set in Italy. The seventh Roman novel featuring Nic Costa and his colleagues, Dante’s Numbers, appears in October 2008 At the end of 2006 he signed renewed contracts with Pan Macmillan in the UK and Bantam Dell in the US to extend the series to nine books, running to 2012. The titles are published in numerous languages around the world including Chinese and Japanese… and Italian.

He has featured regularly on the speaker lists of leading international book events, including the Melbourne and Ottawa writers’ festivals, the Harrogate Crime Festival, Thrillerfest, Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime. He was a faculty member for the 2006 Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California, alongside Martin Cruz Smith and spoke at the same conference with Michael Connelly in 2007.

In 2006 he launched a campaigning web-site save-wye which was instrumental in a successful battle to prevent one of the largest environmental threats to the countryside of Kent in southern England. His non-fiction book on the campaign to defend Wye from development, Saved, was published in May 2007. David lives close to Wye, Kent.Quick facts

Journalism. As a seventeen-year-old trainee on the Scarborough Evening News, David’s first newspaper assignments included flower shows and funerals. Later on The Times he was to report from China shortly after it opened up to western visitors, and regularly from the Middle East.

The big scoop. In 1983 he had one of his odder exclusives, an interview with Frances Griffiths, one of the two young girls behind the Cottingley Fairies which had so captivated Arthur Conan Doyle. At the age of 76, Frances finally confessed the famous pictures were faked.

The lost book. In 1984 a small press in the UK printed a short novel which came out of his time in China. It was called Shanghai Thunder. A rare signed copy recently went on sale at Bouchercon for $500. It is, he says, an ‘execrable piece of work’. As far as he can remember.

Aviation. For years he harboured a bug to learn to fly. This finally happened when he became launch editor of the pilot’s magazine Flyer, which resulted in David gaining twin ratings in the US and UK. The licences lapsed shortly after he returned to full-time writing and pay for his own plane hire.

Travel. David spends a couple of months each year in Italy, mostly in Rome. His home is on the top of the North Downs in Kent, close to the village of Wye.

Free time. The short answer is that he doesn’t have much. Writing a book a year, at the very minimum, is a full-time job. But what spare time he has he likes to spend on travel, food and drink, and developing a small - 400 vines - vineyard planted in 2004 in a field adjoining his home.