About :: davidhewson.com

Journalism. As a seventeen-year-old trainee on the Scarborough Evening News, David’s first newspaper assignments included flower shows and funerals. Later on The Times he was to report from China shortly after it opened up to western visitors, and regularly from the Middle East.

The big scoop. In 1983 he had one of his odder exclusives, an interview with Frances Griffiths, one of the two young girls behind the Cottingley Fairies which had so captivated Arthur Conan Doyle. At the age of 76, Frances finally confessed the famous pictures were faked.

Aviation. For years he harboured a bug to learn to fly. This finally happened when he became launch editor of the pilot’s magazine Flyer, which resulted in David gaining twin ratings in the US and UK. The licences lapsed shortly after he returned to full-time writing and pay for his own plane hire.

Travel. David spends a couple of months each year in Italy, mostly in Rome. His home is on the top of the North Downs in Kent, close to the village of Wye.

Picture: Giliola Chiste

David Hewson’s novels have been translated into a wide range of languages, from Italian to Japanese, and his debut work, Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino.

David was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough. Eight years later he was a staff reporter on The Times in London, covering news, business and latterly working as arts correspondent. He worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction.

Semana Santa won the WH Smith Fresh Talent award for one of the best debut novels of the year in 1996 and was later made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino and Olivier Martinez. Four standalone works followed before A Season for the Dead, the first in a series set in Italy. The titles are published in numerous languages around the world including Chinese and Japanese… and Italian.

He has featured regularly on the speaker lists of leading international book events, including the Melbourne and Ottawa writers’ festivals, the Harrogate Crime Festival, Thrillerfest, Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime. He has taught at writing schools around the world and is a regular faculty member for the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California, where he has worked alongside writers such as Martin Cruz Smith and Michael Connelly.

In 2006 he launched a campaigning web-site save-wye which was instrumental in a successful battle to prevent one of the largest environmental threats to the countryside of Kent in southern England. His non-fiction book on the campaign to defend Wye from development, Saved, was published in May 2007. David lives close to Wye, Kent.