Denise Mina
1966 –
Crime Writer and Playwright
Denise Mina is a Scottish crime writer and playwright. Denise has written twelve novels, three plays, five graphic novels and regularly contributes to television and radio in the UK. She has written the Garnethill trilogy.
Mina's first Paddy Mehan novel, The Field of Blood, was filmed by the BBC for broadcast in 2011, and stars Jayd Johnson, Peter Capaldi and David Morrissey. The second, The Dead Hour was filmed and broadcast in 2013.
Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. Her father worked as an engineer. Because of his work, the family moved 21 times in 18 years: from Paris to The Hague, London, Scotland and Bergen. Mina left school at sixteen and worked in a variety of low-skilled jobs, including: bar maid, kitchen porter and cook. She also worked for a time in a meat processing factory. In her twenties she worked in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal care patients before returning to education and earning a law degree from Glasgow University.
It was while researching a PhD thesis on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders, and teaching criminology and criminal law at Strathclyde University in the 1990s, that she decided to write her first novel Garnethill, published in 1998 by Transworld.
In 1998 Mina was awarded the John Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel for Garnethill (1998). Her novel The End of the Wasp Season (2010) received a number of awards including The Martin Beck Award in 2011 and Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2012. She was on Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction Judging panel in 2014 and is Ambassador for The Beatson Cancer Charity.
Mina’s latest novel is The Red Road (2014).
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