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Martyn Waites
Martyn Waites was born and raised in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Before becoming a writer he worked as a barman, market trader, stand up comic and most notably as an actor. His first novel, Mary’s Prayer, a hard-hitting gangland thriller set in the North East of England, came out in 1997. The second, Little Triggers, appeared a year later. A third, Candleland, followed in 2000. He then turned away from crime fiction and wrote a novel based around the miners’ strike and its legacy, the critically acclaimed Born Under Punches. The White Room, set in Newcastle in the 1960s and based on the life of pre-teen child killer Mary Bell came out in 2004 and was one of The Guardian’s books of the year. Bolstered by a CWA Dagger Award nomination in 2006 he began the Joe Donovan crime series, which features troubled investigative journalist Joe Donovan and his team.
His short stories have appeared in American anthologies such as World’s Finest Mystery And Crime Stories and the forthcoming London Noir and his journalism in publications as far-ranging as Bizarre and The Big Issue to The Bookseller and the magazine for The Howard League For Penal Reform. He has co-written (along with actor/writer Robert Horwell) his first film script, Cold Harbour, and is hopeful that production will start on this very soon.
Martyn has held two writing residencies, one at Huntercombe Young Offenders Insitution and one at HMP Chelmsford. He currently runs arts-based workshops for socially excluded teenagers and adults in London and Essex. He lives, along with his wife, children and collection of 1970s horror films at a secret location in Hertfordshire and his childhood dreams of playing Doctor Who and scoring the winner for Newcastle United in the FA Cup final are destined to remain unfulfilled.
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