M.W. Craven

M. W. Craven (Mike Craven) is an English crime writer, born in Carlisle in 1968 and raised in Newcastle. He joined the British Army at sixteen, later trained as a social worker and spent years as a probation officer in Cumbria, rising to assistant chief officer, before becoming a full-time author.

He is best known for the Cumbria-set Washington Poe series, which begins with The Puppet Show, and for the DI Avison Fluke books. His novels have won the CWA Gold Dagger, the CWA Steel Dagger and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, and have been translated into around thirty languages.