Authors Chris Simms and Sian Hughes join host, Marnie Riches, for this exciting panel event in partnership with the Royal Literary Fund.

This session is ideal for anyone looking to get published, or with a general interest in how the book publishing industry works.

About the Panel

Chris Simms writes tense thrillers mostly set in and around Manchester, where he lives. However, his debut novel Outside the White Lines had no specific location. Instead, it concerned a psychopathic van driver who roams the UK motorway system at night searching for stranded motorists. The idea came to Chris in the early hours of the morning when his own car had broken down on a lonely stretch of road. His later novels (and short stories) have been nominated for various crime-writing awards.

Although Chris’s novels fall into the crime genre, the types of book that influence him as a writer are psychological thrillers featuring a deeply flawed central character. Chris’s writing has been noted for its simple, pared-back style. He attributes this to his early career as a copywriter in the advertising industry: a role that demands using as few words as possible to get a message across.

Siân Hughes is a poet and novelist who lives in her home village of Tilston in South Cheshire, where her first novel, Pearl, is set. Pearl was published by Indigo Press in 2023 and long-listed for the Booker prize.

In May 2026, a second novel, inspired by the works of the Gawain poet, Purity, will be published by Indigo Press, this time set in the Black Country and based on the life of a dry-cleaner called Steffie.

Like most writers Siân has had many other day jobs, and worked for most of her adult life in Further Education in Oxfordshire. Before that she was Education Officer for The Poetry Society, where she established the Young National Poetry Competition over twenty years ago. She has run writing and publishing projects for asylum-seekers in Manchester and Oxford, as well as running creative-writing groups for several charities. Since 2022 she has been running a small community bookshop in Malpas, Cheshire.

Marnie Riches grew up on a rough estate in north Manchester. Exchanging the spires of nearby Strangeways prison for those of Cambridge University, she gained a Masters in German and Dutch. She has been a punk, a trainee rock star, a pretend artist and professional fundraiser. Aside from literary pursuits, gardening is her passion.

Marnie’s award-winning crime-thriller debut, The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, is now ten years old, and in that decade, she has become a bestselling contributor to the genre, with four critically acclaimed series and hundreds of thousands of books sold in the UK alone. She has been translated into ten different languages. The Gardeners’ Club – a must-read for Richard Osman fans – may be Marnie’s twelfth murder mystery, but it is her first foray into cosy crime…with a horticultural twist.

When she isn’t writing about murder most foul, Marnie teaches academic writing for the Royal Literary Fund. She has been a course tutor, supervisor and examiner for Cambridge University’s Masters in crime and thriller writing. She teaches crime-writing for New Writing North and has also taught the Faber Novel Writing Course. She pens historical romance under the pseudonym, Maggie Campbell.