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The UK based Mystery Women group, set up at the end of 1997 was founded by Michelle Spring and Kate Charles.In January 1998, the group held their first meeting at Waterstones in Cambridge with guest speaker Jill Paton Walsh. Shortly after this first event, owing to major writing commitments both Kate Charles and Michelle Spring retired from taking an active role in the organisation and Lizzie Hayes took over the running of the group, with the assistance of Mitch Karunaratne. Mitch produced the first newsletter and worked hard to make the group the success it is, but then took a back seat owing to other commitments. I was fortunate in that Ayo Onatade, who has recently written many of the articles for the newsletters, has taken on an active role.
The group originally met every six weeks usually on a Sunday afternoon. The type of events varying between guest speakers, or a book discussion. After each event, a newsletter was produced reporting on the last event and advertising the forthcoming ones. Periodically, a reading list was compiled drawn from books read over the past year by our members. This list caters for all areas of the genre, and is still distributed widely.
As an exciting start to the new millennium, our first event in January 2000 was a panel of new authors, all with one book published. The featured authors were, Denise Mina, winner of the John Creasy award for best first novel in 1998, Laura Wilson, Andrea Badenock, and Mo Hayder, whose first book had been issued just two weeks previously. Chairing the proceeding was Val McDermid a staunch supporter of the group and its aims.
More recently our events have taken the form of panels made up of new and established authors. And our newsletter has grown from an A4 sheet to a 34 page magazine, with articles, reviews of books and audio's, interviews, news, and even a problem page for troubled writers.
Currently, we have members in the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and South Africa, of which many are published authors, including such distinguished writers as, Ann Granger, Joyce Holms, Paula Gosling, Betty Rowlands, Natasha Coper, Priscilla Masters, Marianne MacDonald, Cath Staincliff, Val McDermid, Stella Duffy, Joanna Hines, Christine Poulson, Nick Stone, Ron Ellis, Victoria Blake, Elizabeth Corley, Andrew Taylor, Judith Cutler, and many others. To ensure that all members have the opportunity to attend events we hold them in different localities.
Although a UK based group we are pleased to have many members from the United States, and we have always been delighted to welcome and organse events for visiting US tours, and always Linda Fairstein in her visits to the UK'
Lizzie Hayes
