​Keynote Speakers

Stewart King teaches in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia, and is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Originally trained in Spanish and Catalan literary studies, since 2013 he has pioneered the study of crime fiction as world literature. In crime fiction studies, he is the author of Murder in the Multinational State: Crime Fiction from Spain (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2019), The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020), winner of the 2020 ICFA Book prize, and The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction (2022). He is currently working on a monograph on world crime fiction. 

Mary Evans is an Emeritus Leverhulme Professor, the author of various  studies of feminism and feminist writers.  Her most recent work (with Sarah Moore and Hazel Johnstone ) is a study of detective fiction ( Detecting the Modern ) and the theme of that book, of how detective  fiction locates the central dynamics of the contemporary world, arises from her continuing interest in  the ways in which we  learn and acquire our social identities. She is  currently working on a study of the ways in which the definition of 'respectable' has been constructed, and changed, for women in the past one hundred years. This project comes out of longstanding interests in the various forms of coincidence between feminism and changing expectations of the 'citizen'.  

Andrew Wilson is a novelist, biographer and journalist. His first book, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize (2003) and also won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and a LAMBDA Literary Award. His first novel, the psychological thriller The Lying Tongue (2007), was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award. He is the author of four novels in a crime series featuring Agatha Christie, all published by Simon & Schuster in the UK and US – A Talent for Murder (2017), A Different Kind of Evil (2018), Death in a Desert Land (2019), and I Saw Him Die (2020). Under the name E.V. Adamson he has written two contemporary psychological thrillers - Five Strangers(2021) and Murder Grove (2022), inspired by his six years living in an eco-village in Spain.