Val McDermid's Blog, page 14
December 20, 2015
Get Your Name Seen Across Scotland!
Raith Rovers Football Club is offering a fantastic affordable opportunity for YOU to have your company or individual name seen across Scotland next season.
The club are looking for front and back of shirt sponsorship on a brand new eye catching away kit for next season.
Breaking away from the norm, the club is offering national and local businesses, groups, charities or even individuals the chance to enter a sponsorship draw at a cost of only £350 per entry.
The first prize will be your logo ⁄ name on the front of the new away kit for next season.
The second prize will be your logo ⁄ name on the back of the new away kit for next season.
First prize winners will also have their name ⁄ logo on all replica tops.
You can have the name of one of your main business partners
You can choose a charity of your choice
You can have an individual name. It can be your own or you can have the memory of a loved one who was a dedicated Rovers supporter
In addition there are four other prizes:
3rd Prize – Match Sponsorship for up to ten guests at one game of our choice
4th Prize – Match Ball Sponsorship for up to six guests at one game of your choice
5th Prize – Hospitality for up to four guests at one game of your choice
6th Prize – Two weekly entries to Roary’s Super Lotto Draw for one year (meaning you could win up to £25,000)
Tickets go on sale from 26th November until 8th January and can be purchased from Stark’s Park, or by emailing commercial@raithrovers.net. Each entrant will receive acknowledgement in the match day programme.
The prize draw will take place at a Sponsorship Reception evening in the Raith Suite at Stark’s Park on Monday 11th January, where Ray McKinnon will make the draw.
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
Each entry costs £350 for one ticket
You can enter as many times as you like at a cost of £350 per entry
Raith Rovers is a non-political and non-religious organisation, and therefore any entries of a political or religious nature will be invalid
Raith Rovers reserve the right to invalidate entries which may be likely to cause offence – ie – acronyms which may contain subliminal messages.
December 11, 2015
Val McDermid and Ian Rankin join attack on swingeing library cuts…
Scotland’s Fife council to close almost a third of its libraries, with further cuts being made across the UK
Alison Flood
The Guardian, 11 December 2015
Fife’s decision to close 16 of its libraries has been attacked by high-profile Scottish authors including Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, as well as by a group of Scottish National Party MPs.
I would not be a writer if it were not for the public library system
– Val McDermid
As a new report on the current state of the UK’s libraries reveals that more than 100 branches closed last year, a reduction of 14% in the total number of libraries since 2010, bestselling crime novelist McDermid called the situation in Fife “disgraceful”. The decision, announced earlier this week, will see the region’s libraries reduced from 51 branches to 35.
Crofton Park library in London, which is now run as a social enterprise. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian
“What does this do to our culture?” said McDermid, who grew up in Fife. “We complain all the time about young people not reading books, but if we make it harder for them to get books, reading is not going to increase. Libraries are there for people who can’t afford books, or whose families don’t see any value in reading books.”
McDermid said that she grew up in a family with no money to spend on books. “Frankly, I would not be a writer if it were not for the public library system,” she said. “In Fife we have a library built with Andrew Carnegie’s money – those industrialists understood the value of educating people. These are the things we are losing. These are the things we are throwing away.”
Read the full article on the Guardian website…
December 7, 2015
Val wins The Reichenbach Falls Award for Most Epic Ending 2015…
The Skeleton Road … won the Dead Good Reader Awards ‘Reichenbach Falls Award for Most Epic Ending 2015’
Others shortlisted for the award included:
The Defence – by Steve Cavanagh (Orion)
‘The Girl on the Train’ – by Paula Hawkins (Transworld)
‘The Nightmare Place’ – by Steve Mosby (Orion)
‘Let You Go’ – by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere)
‘Personal’ – by Lee Child (Transworld)
November 19, 2015
Scots writers including Val McDermid, Ian Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre demand reform of defamation law that ‘threatens freedom of speech’…
By David Leask, Chief Reporter / Wednesday 18 November 2015
the Herald Scotland
Scotland’s most celebrated writers have warned of a threat to their freedom of speech.
James Kelman, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Chris Brookmyre and Neal Ascherson are among more than 100 authors demanding reform of the country’s antiquated defamation laws.
In a joint letter organised by freedom of speech organisation Scottish Pen, the writers warn that they – along with campaigners, scientists and journalists – are facing the “chilling” effect of libel action threats.
Read the full article on the HeraldScotland website…
November 3, 2015
Rosemary Goring: are internet trolls a new breed of woman hater?
Rosemary Goring, Literary editor ⁄ columnist ⁄ Monday 2 November 2015
On Saturday, at Linlithgow’s bijou book festival, Val McDermid could not tell her audience very much about her new novel, Splinter the Silence, for fear of giving away the plot.
What she did reveal, however, is that its subject is the rise of internet trolls, those offensive patrollers of the online world who make twitterers of thin skin and anxious disposition nervous to broadcast even the blandest remarks. If J K Rowling can be savaged for expressing delight at the Scottish rugby squad’s performance in the world cup quarter final, what is safe for someone to say without fear of cyber assault?
McDermid believes that women are far more often the butt of trolls than men, despite the fact she has rarely been targeted. Even when she appeared on Question Time, a programme where, with the exception of politicians, most women’s performance is routinely met by twitter abuse, she emerged unscathed. Perhaps, as her teenage son has helpfully suggested, this is because she looks “so scary”. Or because, as her fiction attests, she knows countless undetectable ways to kill people.
Read the full article on the Herald Scotland website…
October 29, 2015
Val on German reading tour…
Itinerary:
COLOGNE:
Wednesday, 4. November 2015
20:15hr
Mayersche bookstore , Neumarkt 2 , Cologne
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: David Nathan
HANNOVER:
Thursday, 5. November 2015
20:00hr
Decius bookstore Marktstr.52 , Hannover
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: David Nathan
HAMBURG:
Friday, 6. November 2015
Kampnagel p1
19:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: David Nathan
MÜNCHEN:
Saturday, 7. November 2015
Institute of Forensic Medicine / Section Auditorium
19:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Gregor Weber
GROSS-UMSTADT:
Sunday, 8. November 2015
Gasthaus zur Goldenen Krone, market 7.64823 Gross-Umstadt
19:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Gregor Weber
STUTTGART:
Monday, 9. November 2015
Wittwer Book House , King Street 30
20:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Jasmin Tabatabai
SALZBURG:
Tuesday, 10. November 2015
City Library Salzburg
20:00hr
Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf
German voice: Peter Faerber
Vienna:
Wednesday, 11. November 2015
17:00hr
Signing at bookstore Frick , Kärtnerstr.30
21:00hr
Buch Wien
Moderation: Florian Scheuba
German voice: Peter Faerber
October 22, 2015
Amos and McDermid among Rendell memorial speakers…
October 21, 2015 by Katherine Cowdrey
Novelist Val McDermid and Baroness Valerie Amos, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, will be among the speakers at the memorial service for crime writer Ruth Rendell next week.
They will be joined by Penguin Random House UK chair Gail Rebuck and actor Christopher Ravenscroft, who played DI Burden in ITV series “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries”…
Picture: Jerry Bauer
Read the full article on The Bookseller website.
September 24, 2015
Louise Welsh: writers and academics must work together…
Portrait of Louise Welsh by Steve Lindridge of www.idealimages.co.uk
Thursday 24 September 2015 13.20 BST
The Guardian
‘The novelist is like a detective,’ says writer, citing Val McDermid’s collaboration on a course in forensic science as a model for understanding between arts and academia…
Novelist Louise Welsh made her professorial debut at Glasgow University on Tuesday with a call for collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
In an evening lecture entitled Sleight of Hand, the Art of Writing Fiction, Welsh, who was appointed professor of creative writing in June, said: “The potential for collaboration between writers and academics is increasingly recognised, resulting in fiction, poetry and music, helping the lay person to better understand and appreciate academic research.
Pointing to crime novelist Val McDermid’s recent work on a forensic science course with Dundee University as “a great example of how writers and academics can collaborate”, Welsh also discussed her own project during last year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the Empire Cafe. This well-received collaboration with historians, musicians and playwrights was the first full-scale cultural examination of Scotland’s role in the North Atlantic slave trade.
September 15, 2015
Bloody Scotland Announces 2015 Figures, Most Successful Year Yet…
Posted at 9:10PM Monday 14 Sep 2015
Book2Book
Organisers of the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival are today delighted to announce their most successful year yet, having issued 5884 tickets over three days, and to confirm that in 2016, the festival will run from 9-11 September.
Organisers of the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival are today delighted to announce their most successful year yet…
Authors like Martina Cole, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Ann Cleeves, Linwood Barclay, Arne Dahl and Peter May held court over five historic, atmospheric venues in the centre of Stirling during a packed-out, exciting and varied weekend (11-13 September 2015). The opening Friday night alone attracted over 900 audience members for two events: McDermid and May in conversation, and Whose Crime Is It Anyway, a raucous comedy event hosted by Hardeep Singh Kohli in which authors Chris Brookmyre, Caro Ramsay and Kevin Wignall improvised a crime novel live onstage.
Sold out events this year included a session examining the infamous World’s Ends Murders, an event looking at the poisons Agatha Christie used to kill her victims, a session on how to self-publish your own books, and author events with Denise Mina, Belinda Bauer and leading Nordic writers Gunnar Staalsen, Johan Theorin and Ragnar Jonasson. The festival also took over famous Stirling whisky bar The Curly Coo for a night, with songs and storytelling from authors like McDermid, Brookmyre, Lucy Ribchester and Ian Rankin at a lively, fun and completely unprecendented late night session.
September 14, 2015
Splinter the Silence review – chilling return for the queen of thrillers…
Psychological profiler Tony Hall and ex-DCI Carol Jordan return in a timely investigation into online abuse
Lucy Scholes
Sunday 13 September 2015 14.00 BST
Val McDermid is back with her much-loved crime-fighting partnership, psychological profiler Tony Hill and ex-DCI Carol Jordan.
The case that reunites them is a chillingly timely one, focusing on online abuse suffered by outspoken women with a feminist agenda. This isn’t the conventional setup though: there’s “no forensics, no loose ends to pull”, not even a murder verdict to kickstart the investigation – just three seemingly unconnected suicides, each mimicking that of a famous writer: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf.
Read the full article on the Guardian website…
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