Gillian Linscott
1944
Gillian Linscott is a British historical fiction and mystery author best known as the author of the Nell Bray series of novels. Linscott was born in Windsor, England in 1944 to shoe shop manager Thomas Snow and shop assistant Muriel Rosaline. As a teenager, she went to Somerville College in Oxford from where she graduated in 1966. In 1988 she got married to writer Anthony Joseph Vincent Geraghty. After she graduated from college, she found a job as a journalist and worked for the likes of the “Guardian” and the “BBC” among several other media outlets. During the 1970s she had many assignments reporting on the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland even though she also did a lot of reporting on parliament. In time, she turned to crime fiction writing and it was not long before she went full time after publishing her debut novel “A Healthy Body” in 1984. Her popular “Nell Bray” novels that feature a suffragette detective as the lead have won the Best International Historical Mystery Novel at the Herodotus Award and been the winner of the Ellis Peters/CWA Historical Dagger Award in 2000. Linscott has also written the Victorian Era “Liberty Lane” series as Caro Peacock. When she is not writing her novels, she is an avid gardener and has a garden with rows of lettuce in her back yard.