Welcome to the official Mo Hayder website

Mo Hayder left school at fifteen. She worked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Asia. She has an MA in film from The American University in Washington DC and an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University UK.

Her debut, BIRDMAN, published in January 2000, was an international bestseller. Her second novel, THE TREATMENT, also a Sunday Times bestseller, won the 2002 WH Smith Thumping Good Read award. Her third novel Sunday Times bestseller TOKYO, which was published in May 2004 in the UK, won the Elle magazine crime fiction prize, the SNCF Prix Polar, and was nominated for three CWA dagger awards. Tokyo was published as THE DEVIL OF NANKING in the US March 2005. PIG ISLAND her fourth best seller was published in April 2006 and was nominated for both a Barry Award for best british crime novel and a CWA dagger. Her fifth book, RITUAL, the first of THE WALKING MAN series, has been nominated for The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award and one of the 14 short-listed titles for the coveted title of Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2009. The third of THE WALKING MAN series is GONE.

Mo lives in Bath with her daughter Lotte-Genevieve.

Image © Margaret Lister

Front cover of the book 'Gone' by Mo HayderCongratulations Mo Hayder - 2012 Edgar Awards - Best Novel Award

Gone has won the category of best novel in the 2012 Mystery Writers of America, Edgar Allan Poe Awards - acknowledged to be the most prestigious awards in the genre. The award was announced on Thursday, April 26, 2012 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York.

Nominees

  • The Ranger by Ace Atkins (Penguin Group USA - G.P. Putnam's Sons)
  • Gone by Mo Hayder (Grove/Atlantic - Atlantic Monthly Press)
  • The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Minotaur Books)
  • 1222 by Anne Holt (Simon & Schuster - Scribner)
  • Field Gray by Philip Kerr (Penguin Group USA - G.P. Putnam's Sons - Marion Wood Books)

Front cover of the book 'Hanging Hill' by Mo HayderHanging Hill the new novel by Mo Hayder

Published in paperback by Bantam Press on 29th March 2012

Longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the Year 2011, Hanging Hill is a tense, thrilling and brilliantly original novel which reveals the evil side of human nature and the terrible things that normal people can do.

A teenage girl has been brutally murdered on her way home from school. The cryptic message ‘all like her’ is crudely written on her body. The dead girl’s friends are deeply shocked and upset, but they all refuse to reveal anything about her last movements. Who are they protecting – and what do they know?

Headstrong Detective Inspector Zoe Benedict knows exactly how she wants to work this case, but her own dark past, if exposed, may jeopardize the search for justice, and destroy her in the process.

“With Mo Hayder you never know where you are going until you get there. A chiller to the very end.” THE TIMES

Further information about Hanging Hill

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Gone has won the category of best novel for the 2012 Mystery Writers of America, Edgar Allan Poe Awards.
 

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