Janet Laurence (Chair)

Janet Laurence, also known by her pen name Julia Lisle, is a British author and cookery writer.

From 1978, Laurence began to write cookery articles for Country Life and the The Daily Telegraph. Eventually she became the sole author of the Telegraphs weekly ‘Bon Viveur’ column. She also wrote a series of articles in Country Life about historical cooking.She has written or co-written eight cookery books, notably books about Scandinavian cooking.

Laurence’s first crime novel, ‘A Deepe Coffyn’, was published in 1989, the first of ten contemporary novels featuring cookery writer Darina Lisle and policeman William Pigram. She also wrote one non-series mystery fiction book, ‘To Kill The Past’.Laurence has also written four historical crime novels – three books where the detective is a fictionalised Canaletto (the Italian artist),and one set in early Edwardian times.Laurence was the 1998/1999 Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association,and has been Chair of a number of CWA award judging panels including in 2007 and 2008 for the CWA Ellis Peters Award for best Historical Crime Novel and since 2013 for the CWA International Dagger.

Kasia Boddy

Kasia Boddy has published books and articles on a variety of subjects including boxing, geraniums and American fiction and culture. Her reviews of crime novels have appeared in the Telegraph, the Guardian and other newspapers. She teaches American literature at Cambridge University.

Ruth Morse

Ruth Morse retired recently from her Chair at the Université Paris-Sorbonne-Cité (Diderot), having previously taught at the universities of London, Sussex, Leeds, and Cambridge. She has published many articles and reviews on a variety of topics including medieval literature, Shakespeare, and crime fiction, which she reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. She will now teach crime fiction at the National Humanities Center in the US and for the Institute of Continuing Education at Cambridge.

Ian Alister

Having studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at university, Ian worked as an archaeologist before starting a second-hand book business in Cambridge. Thirty years ago he trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst and has found extensive reading of crime fiction an ideal complement to clinical practice.