Lisa Jewell in Conversation at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival
By Sarah Morgan, August 2026
It’s been a big few days for Lisa Jewell. The writer is this year’s Programming Chair at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, so she’s barely had a second to herself.
“I have been slightly living off my nerves,” she grins, “fuelled by Betty’s biscuits and toast.”
There are worse ways to keep yourself going, of course, and it’s clearly worked – she still looks, rather enviably, as fresh as a daisy, although you get the impression she’ll probably sleep for a week once the adrenaline wears off.
Nevertheless, she doesn’t regret taking on the epic task of driving Europe’s biggest crime fiction event forward – in fact, she claims she was touched to be asked to take on the task, having started her writing career getting people together rather than stabbing them in the back.
“Crime writers are a friendly bunch, but when Mick Herron tapped me on the shoulder and said they wanted me to be Programming Chair, I knew I really had been accepted,” claims Jewell.
Having written 14 books in the genre (out of 24 in total), she’s certainly earned the right to take the job. What is perhaps more remarkable is that she had a very different career before taking up writing.
“I was a bookish child, as all writers are,” she remembers. “I always wanted to write but got thrown off the scent and did a general arts course. Then all my friends wanted to go to fashion college and I wanted to be with them. I ended up working for Warehouse, then lost my job and had a disastrous first marriage I won’t go into.
“While on holiday in Gozo, I read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which I loved. It was so accessible, it felt as if it must have been so simple and easy to write. One night I got very drunk, so when a friend asked me what I really wanted to do, I said write a book. She took me seriously and told me to do it. So, in October 1996, I started.”
The result was Ralph’s Party, which came out in 1996.
“My readership exploded”
“It was around the time of Bridget Jones and everybody was looking for books about young women in London. It did very well. I was interviewed by all the broadsheets and was on Late Review, which was quite a thing for a young flibbertigibbet who happened to write something as a drunken bet.”
More romances followed in quick succession, until she “started writing a book called The Truth About Melody Browne. I took the male character out of it and I realised I wasn’t writing a romantic comedy. That’s when my career started to shift.
“I think (my readers) kind of grew with me, although I have had a few ask if I’d go back to writing about romance again. All I know is that when I started writing thrillers, my readership exploded.”
As for her work process, it appears to be an extension of her approach to life itself.
“I live my life instinctively,” explains Lisa. “I’m not a planner in any way. I try not to think too far ahead. I think it’s better to let your gut lead you. That’s definitely how I write.
“Someone said that writing a book is like making a million decisions. Some people like to make all of them first. Some like to know a few. I like not to make any – I’m just making decisions as I go.”
It’s hard to believe that after witnessing how her tenure in charge at Harrogate has ticked along like clockwork. But if flying by the seat of her pants is what works for Lisa Jewell, an award-winning author with more bestsellers to her name than you can shake a stick at, who are we to argue?
images: Richard Maude
Sarah Morgan studied film journalism at post-graduate level with the BFI and has been writing about TV and film for PA Media’s newspaper, magazine and new media customers since 1996. She’s also written for a wide range of other publications, both online and in print, including the book Offbeat and Intermission magazine, and is a regular contributor to the Talking Pictures TV podcast. When she isn’t watching movies, she’s collecting and reading vintage crime and horror paperback books or, for her sins, watching her beloved Sheffield Wednesday.
