Cara Hunter

So, the short version: I write crime thrillers. I love cats, champagne and chocolate, and my guilty pleasure is watching true crime on TV. I used to get teased about it but now I just smile and say ‘Research’…

Want to know a bit more? Well, I studied English at Oxford in the 1980s, and went back to do a doctorate in 2003. By that time I’d spent 15 years in business, first in the City, and later in PR for Guinness (now Diageo), and after that I worked as a freelance copywriter, which gave me a a lot of useful experience and a healthy respect for meeting deadlines.

There are two achievements I’m most proud of in my life, and the first was to get to Oxford, having come from a state school and a family where no-one had even done A levels before. That’s why I have such a profound love for local libraries – we didn’t have a lot of books at home so my weekly visit to the library as a child was my lifeline, and a passport to another world. And without that access to books, and the love of reading they gave me, I would never have ended up at Oxford, either.