Judges

One of the UK’s most accomplished and respected novelists, Val McDermid has sold over 19 million books to date across the globe and her work has been translated into more than 40 languages.

She has written five series: cold case detective Karen Pirie was introduced to us in The Distant Echo and the 8th book in the series will be published in 2025, with Karen now starring in a major ITV series; clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan lead a gripping eleven book series adapted for television as Wire in the Blood, starring Robson Green and Hermione Norris; the Kate Brannigan novels showcase a private detective;  journalist Lindsay Gordon is at the heart of another series; and most recently, Val has launched a new series featuring young journalist Allie Burns whose life and experiences we witness at ten year intervals, debuting with 1979  1989.

Val has also published several award-winning standalone novels, books of non-fiction, short story collections and a children’s picture book, My Granny is a Pirate. Val returned to Karen Pirie with her 2023 hardback, Past Lying, which was published in October of that year. 2024 saw the publication of Queen Macbeth, her reimagining of the story of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, in May. Her latest Karen Pirie novel is Silent Bones.

Eliza Clark is the author of novels Boy Parts and Penance and the short story collection She’s Always Hungry. Boy Parts was named Blackwell’s Fiction book of the year and was adapted for the stage in 2023.

She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Futures 10 award and listed on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe. She also writes for film and television.

Lanre Bakare is arts and culture correspondent for the Guardian, where his work focuses on the intersection of art, race and culture across multiple disciplines.

He was senior correspondent on the Cotton Capital project, which was an exposé on the Guardian’s founders’ links to transatlantic slavery and was recognised at the Press Awards as a “breathtakingly honest mea culpa”.

His debut non-fiction book We Were There was published by The Bodley Head. The cultural history of Black Britain during the Thatcher era was chosen as a book of the year for 2025 by GQ, Esquire and the Observer. He is currently working on his second book – a deep dive into global mixed-race cultures.

Lanre was born and grew up in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Nikita Lalwani was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. She is a novelist and screenwriter whose work has been translated into sixteen languages. She and was one of the writers on the BBC1/Amazon series ‘The Outlaws‘ created by Stephen Merchant and also wrote the screenplay for the film Picture This (2025), a romantic comedy that took the no.1 spot worldwide on Amazon prime in 76 countries during the first fortnight of its release.

Lalwani is the author of three novels: her first book, Gifted, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction.

Lalwani has been a judge for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the RSL Encore Second Novel Prize and The Orwell Prize. She was born in Rajasthan, raised in Cardiff and lives in London.

Paul Smith is best known as the singer for the Newcastle-based art-rock group Maxïmo Park, who recently celebrated their 20th anniversary in the wake of their eighth studio album, Stream Of Life. He has released three acclaimed solo albums and collaborated with the likes of Rachel Unthank, Tricky, and Field Music’s Peter Brewis.

Crossing over into the literary world, Paul has also hosted the Penguin Books podcast and worked with poets Lavinia Greenlaw and Tom Pickard.