Authors A to Z - Mike Ripley

Mike Ripley is the author of 16 novels, including the Angel series which have twice won the Crime Writers' Last Laugh Award for comedy.

He was the co-editor of the legendary Fresh Blood anthologies, a scriptwriter for BBC TVs Lovejoy and served as the Daily Telegraph's crime fiction critic for ten years. He currently writes a monthly crime column for the Birmingham Post.

He helped launch the 2007 Essex Book Festival with crime writer P.D. James and hosted a sell-out "evening with Morse and Lewis" with his old friend Colin Dexter at the Civic Theatre, Chelmsford.

He has been appointed a Tutor at Cambridge University's institute of continuing education to teach a course in creative writing and crime fiction.

He currently runs the only internet gossip column (Getting Away With Murder) dedicated to crime fiction on shotsmag.co.uk.

After 20 years of working in London, he decamped to East Anglia and became an archaeologist. He was thus one of the few crime writers who regularly turned up real bodies, which he named after fictional detectives. (The Digger picture shows me and 'Miss Marple')

In 2003, at the age of 50, he suffered a stroke and regained the use of his left hand and arm by bashing out a book on an old portable typewriter on the kitchen table. He is the author of Surviving A Stroke [White Ladder Press, 2006], acts as a volunteer media spokesman for the Blood Pressure Association and sits on the government's Stroke Strategy Steering Committee.