Chris Lloyd

After graduating in Spanish and French, Chris Lloyd lived in Catalonia for over twenty years, first in Girona and then in Barcelona, where he taught English and worked in educational publishing and as a travel writer. More recently, he worked as a Catalan and Spanish translator. He has also lived in Grenoble – researching the French Resistance movement – as well as in the Basque Country and Madrid.

He writes the Occupation series, featuring Eddie Giral, a French police detective in Paris under Nazi rule. The first book in the series, The Unwanted Dead, won the HWA Gold Crown Award for best historical novel of the year, was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Award and was Waterstone’s Welsh Book of the Month. The second, Paris Requiem, was a Sunday Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023. Published in August 2024, the third in the series, Banquet of Beggars, sees Eddie caught up in the world of the black market while having to work with the Occupiers to prevent a tragedy.

He has also written a trilogy set in present-day Girona, in Catalonia, featuring Elisenda Domènech, a police officer in the devolved Catalan police force. The head of an experimental Serious Crime Unit, she fights the worst of human excesses in the most beautiful of settings.

Chris lives in a seaside town in his native Wales with his wife, a jewellery designer. When he’s not writing or trying to keep up with his reading pile, he loves losing himself in European cities, languages, red wine, old movies, rock music, Euro-crime TV series and – recently, thanks to Eddie – 1920s to 1940s French jazz. He is a member of Crime Cymru, a co-operative of crime fiction writers with a connection to Wales, and was part of the team that brought the country’s first international crime fiction festival to Aberystwyth, in 2023.