Mark Griffin

Mark Griffin began his writing career with three successive years of gold medal awards in the Hampshire Writing Festival before he moved to Los Angeles in 1996. There, he turned his attention to script writing and development. He wrote music video treatments for director Steve Carr, for artists such as Lil Zane, Ice Cube and Korn and became a script reader at CAA in Los Angeles where he read hundreds of scripts and novels for Warner Brothers, 20th Fox and Universal Studios. The first screenplay he sold: By The Dawn’s Early Light, was to Michael Mendelsohn at Patriot Pictures, and soon after he had other scripts optioned; The Last Three Minutes with Chuck Roven at Atlas Entertainment, Cinch with Avi Lerner at Nu Image and Dungeon with Julia Verdin at Rough Diamond Entertainment.

In 2021 he co-wrote the screenplay, Final Breath, which has Carol Harding attached to produce and Steve M Kelly set to direct.

In April 2017, Mark was short-listed in the top five out of three and a half thousand entrants in a national crime thriller writing competition sponsored by Random House Publishing for his debut novel, When Darkness Calls, (released 2018) which long-listed for the prestigious John Creasy Blood Dagger Award.

When Darkness Calls was the first book in a series starring criminal psychologist Holly Wakefield and DI Bishop of the Metropolitan Police. Little Brown Books in the UK acquired world English rights for the first four books from Mark, his debut and its sequel When Angels Sleep (released March 2019), book three, When Silence Kills (released August 2021) and book four, When Evil Wakes (paperback release date February 16th 2023) through Luigi Bonomi at LBA Books. German rights for the same four books were pre-empted by Harper Collins Germany via Nicki Kennedy at ILA which is handling all translation rights.

As well as plays and numerous screenplays, Mark is now working on the next six books in the Holly Wakefield series for the same publishers reaching the UK, Europe and the North American Markets where all of Mark’s books are now available. He is also completing several scripts and stand-alone novels including: Dreamweaver (a YA fantasy adventure), and The Autumn People (a horror novel set in a Cornish village).

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/little-brown-bags-scriptwriters-thriller-debut-723841

https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/piatkus-bags-two-more-crime-griffin-1223055