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Crime Story

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Crime Story is a festival born of a partnership between New Writing North, Northumbria University and Arts Council England, taking place on 11th June.

Appealing to crime readers as well as fans of Serial and Making a Murderer, the day-long festival invites audience and experts to pick apart a fictional crime, written this year by Paula Hawkins, the writer of The Girl On The Train, and the headliner for 2016’s festival.

Crime Story is an innovative festival for readers and writers of crime fiction, providing rare access to experts from the fields of forensics, criminology, pathology and law, who reveal and interrogate the facts behind crime fiction. The biennial festival was launched by New Writing North and Northumbria University in 2014.

For crime writers, the festival also offers an extraordinary opportunity to challenge and improve the authenticity of their writing, by giving unique access to a wide range of experts in police science, as well as crime writers and publishing industry leaders.

Crime Story takes place in Newcastle upon Tyne on Saturday 11 June. The full festival programme will be announced and tickets released on Thursday 10 March at Crime Story: Portrait of a Criminal.

Crime Story: Portrait of a Criminal will be announcing the festival’s programme of events in a unique way. See details below.

Crime Story: Portrait of a Criminal

Thursday 10 March, 7pm
Live Theatre, Newcastle
Tickets £10/£8 concessions

Join us for a special event in which two award-winning writers explore the minds of two of the most notorious criminals of recent times.

Dan Davies spent more than a decade writing the highly-acclaimed biography, In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, which won the Gordon Burn Prize 2015 and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize 2015. The book is both an extraordinary portrait of Savile, compiled from years of interviews and dogged research, as well an enquiry into the society that enabled him for so long.

Portrait of a Criminal also launches Northern Writers’ Awards winner Andrew Hankinson’s You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]. The book covers the last days of the fugitive gunman Raoul Moat, who shot three people before going on the run in rural Northumberland. The book is written in Moat’s own words, pieced together from letters and recordings, offering a compelling insight into his paranoid state. You Could Do Something Amazing has already been named by several critics as one of the books of 2016.

Dan Davies and Andrew Hankinson, writers in the tradition of David Peace and Gordon Burn, will discuss the subjects of their work, their own methods and the place of true crime in literary writing.

Ticket holders for Portrait of a Criminal: Crime Story will receive £10/£8 off their Crime Story festival ticket price.

Find out more and keep up to date with events on the Crime Story Festival website.

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