Jude Simms

From earliest childhood I’ve enjoyed hearing, reading, and writing stories, but while the love of reading has never left me, somehow the joy of writing purely for pleasure became neglected over time. Then a few years ago I joined an online writing group, and found there the encouragement I needed to rediscover and recognise and start exploring again the possibilities within me, and thus my love of writing was rekindled.

In 2010 I went as a mature student to Sheffield Hallam University, graduating in 2015 with a BA (First Class Honours) in English, and in 2016 with an MA (Distinction) in Creative Writing. In fact, my first novel began lie as an assignment on ‘The Historical Novel’ – although it’s changed quite considerably since that first attempt!

During my studies, I gave up a twenty five year career in admin and communications to focus on writing – but again, life soon got in the way, and it’s only in the last four years or so that I’ve picked it up again.

My love of history – social history, Victorian history, and particularly the history of my home town of Sheffield – feeds naturally into my writing, and that historical novel assignment has now grown into a full length historical crime novel. Dead in the Water is set against the backdrop of the ‘Great Inundation’ of 1864, a catastrophic flood that devastated Victorian Sheffield. In 2025, Dead in the Water won the Plaza First Chapters prize for crime fiction, and in 2026 it was longlisted for the CWA Emerging Author Dagger. It’s currently undergoing further editing and submission to agents and publishers, alongside research and first drafting of Cold in the Grave, the second in the series.

CWA Awards

• CWA Debut Dagger - Longlisted

Other Awards

In 2025, my novel Dead in the Water won the Plaza First Chapters prize for crime fiction. The judge, bestselling author David Mark (D.S. Aector McAvoy series, Sal Delaney series) said:

“I adored this submission, bringing together the Holy Trinity of Plot, Place and Character in a way that should have agents salivating. It’s a remarkable self-assured piece of writing for a debut novelist and does a wonderful job of creating a richly textured landscape, using a gorgeously lyrical prise style to build a world which drew me in and held me prisoner. Historical Crime fiction is such a difficult thing to get right, with the temptation to show off one’s impeccable research often getting in the way of character development and plot momentum. This sample found the perfect balance, as it did with its depictions of both the darkness and the light. A brilliant read.”