CILIPS Conference 2017: First keynote speaker confirmed

Category: News

We are delighted to announce that Val McDermid is the first keynote speaker to be confirmed for the CILIP in Scotland Conference 2017, taking place in Dundee on June 5th and 6th.

Val is a keen supporter of libraries and an award winning writer. Val comes from Kirkcaldy, Fife, and read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (where she is now an Honorary Fellow). She was the first ever student from a state school in Scotland and following graduation she became a journalist, and worked briefly as a dramatist.

Her first success as a novelist came with Report for Murder, The first Lindsay Gordon Mystery, published in 1987. Among her many awards are the Portico Prize for Fiction, the LA Times Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Pioneer Award and the Cartier Diamond Dagger. She has published 27 novels, short stories, non-fiction and a prize-winning children’s book. She is a regular broadcaster for BBC radio and lives in Edinburgh

Val was a supporter of our ‘Scotland’s Libraries: Inspiration for the Nation’ campaign in May 2016 saying “I wouldn’t be a writer if not for the public library system – I simply wouldn’t have had access to the myriad worlds of books otherwise. But it’s not just the next generation of writers who need libraries. They are multi-purpose spaces that fulfill a broad range of needs for a wide spectrum of society. They are repositories of possibilities for all of us.”

Bookings will open in January and more speakers will be announced soon.