Bestselling author celebrates launch of her latest book with live talk

International best selling author Ann Cleeves is returning to Kingsbridge to celebrate the launch of her latest book The Heron’s Cry. 

Ann Cleeves has written around 40 novels, and is probably best known for writing the Vera Stanhope series, which was dramatised in the ITV programme Vera, featuring Brenda Blethyn in the title role. 

Her new book, The Heron’s Cry, is the second in the Two Rivers series, the first of which, The Long Call is the adaptive basis for the ITV series The Long Call starring Ben Aldridge as DI Matthew Venn.

She has also written the novel series Palmer Jones, Inspector Ramsey, Shetland Island and two standalone books The Sleeping and the Dead (2001) and Burial of Ghosts (2003). 

Ann will be at Kingsbridge Library on Thursday, 2 September, to give a live talk about her new book and sign copies. You can get a ticket for the live talk for £5 and for £20 you can get a ticket to the talk and a signed copy of The Heron’s Cry.  

Ann grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs - child care officer, women's refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard - before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.

Ann's books have been translated into twenty languages. She's a bestseller in Scandinavia and Germany. Her novels sell widely and to critical acclaim in the United States. Raven Black was shortlisted for the Martin Beck award for best translated crime novel in Sweden in 2007. It has been adapted for radio in Germany - and in the UK where it was a Radio Times pick of the day when it was first broadcast Radio adaptations of Raven Black and White Nights have both been repeated. 

Ten series of Vera, the ITV adaptation starring Brenda Blethyn, have been shown in the UK and worldwide, and filming on series eleven (delayed because of the coronavirus) resumed in the autumn of 2020; there have also been five series of Shetland, based on the characters and settings of her Shetland novels, and filming resumed in 2021. 

A television adaptation of The Long Call, the first in Ann's new series set in North Devon, has been commissioned by ITV from Silverprint Pictures, the company that has already produced Shetland (BBC) and Vera (ITV), and this too is filming during the summer of 2021.

For more information, visit the event listing on SouthHams.com HERE.