Two best-selling authors compare crime writing, detectives and crime in their home countries, Scotland and Romania. Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith.
Thursday 29 October 2020, 6:30pm
online | Livestream on RCI London’s Facebook page and recorded on YouTube channel from Fri 30 Oct
Ian Rankin is the UK’s number one best-selling crime writer. He lives in Edinburgh and writes about the city in his award-winning ‘Inspector Rebus’ novels. The books have twice been dramatised for television (starring John Hannah and Ken Stott respectively), and are translated into 36 languages. His own three-part documentary series on the subject of evil was broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2002. Ian Rankin appears regularly on television, radio and at festivals.
The Rebus series is now translated into twenty-two languages and the books are bestsellers on several continents. In addition to his Rebus and Malcolm Fox novels, he has also written standalone novels including Doors Open (Orion, 2008), which was televised in 2012, short stories, a graphic novel – Dark Entries (Vertigo Crime, 2009) – and a play (with Mark Thomson, the Royal Lyceum Theatre’s Artistic Director) Dark Road, which premiered at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in September 2013. A second play, Long Shadows, starring John Rebus, was co-written with Rona Munro and staged in 2018. There are also a number of novels under the pseudonym ‘Jack Harvey’ and in 2005 he collaborated with singer Jackie Leven on a CD. His non-fiction book Rebus’s Scotland was published in 2005.
Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar Award for Resurrection Men (Orion, 2002). He has also been shortlisted for the Edgar and Anthony Awards in the USA and won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and Germany’s Deutscher Krimipreis.
Read more about him on his website.
Bogdan Teodorescu trained initially as an engineer but his passion for words led him to a career change. As a journalist and communications expert, he became a sought-after political analyst and election campaign manager. In 1996-97 he was briefly Acting Head of the Public Information Department, which gave him ample material for the political thrillers he would later write. He is currently Professor of Political Marketing and Communications at the prestigious National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest, as well as president of an agency specialising in political analysis and opinion polls.
Aside from his academic publications, Bogdan Teodorescu has written three novels, all of them bestsellers in Romania, a travel journal and a prize-winning volume of poetry. Spada/ Sword was translated into French in 2016 to excellent reviews. Le Figaro called it ‘a noir novel with troubling political implications, as dark and as shocking as they come’, while Metro described it as ‘the perfect example of what a good novel (noir or any other colour) should be: intelligent, entertaining, asking tough questions.’
The event is part of Romania Rocks: Romanian-British Literature Festival.