Due to popular demand the venue for this event has changed to the MINERVA ROOM at the Ballaarat Mechanics Institute.

Meet Ann Cleeves on her 2022 Australian tour as she discusses Vera Stanhope's return in her newest book, The Rising Tide.
Ann Cleeves is the author of more than thirty-five critically acclaimed novels, and in 2017 was awarded the highest accolade in crime writing, the CWA Diamond Dagger.
She is the creator of popular detectives Vera Stanhope (ITV's Vera), Jimmy Perez (BBC One's Shetland), and Matthew Venn (ITV's The Long Call)
2022 marks 30 years of publishing with Pan Macmillan.

Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She is a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other British northern writers to promote crime fiction. Ann also spends her time advocating for reading to improve health and wellbeing and support access to books. In 2021 her Reading for Wellbeing project launched with local authorities across the Northeast of England.

She lives in Northumberland where the Vera books are set.

Jock Serong
Jock Serong’s novels have received the ARA Historical Novel Prize, the Colin Roderick Award, the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction and, internationally, the inaugural Staunch Prize (UK) and the Historia Award for Historical Crime Fiction (France). He lives with his family on Victoria’s far west coast. He is the author of five novels, The Burning Island, Preservation, On the Java Ridge, The Rules of Backyard Cricket, Quota, and soon to be published, The Settlement. Jock is also the founding editor of the Great Ocean Quarterly and is a voracious reader of everything.