2022 Knowlton Literary Festival

Author of the Inspector Banks novels

Peter Robinson was born in Yorkshire. After getting his BA Honours Degree in English Literature at the University of Leeds, he came to Canada and took his MA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, with Joyce Carol Oates as his tutor, then a PhD in English at York University. He has taught at a number of Toronto community colleges and universities and served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Windsor, 1992-93.

His first novel, Gallows View (1987), introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. It was short-listed for the John Creasey Award in the UK and the Crime Writers of Canada best first novel award. He has published 28 books in the Inspector Banks series, all receiving multiple awards.

Caedmon’s Song, the first departure from the series, was published in 1990 and was also nominated for an Arthur. 

Robinson has also published many short stories. Innocence won the CWC Best Short Story Award, 1991. The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage which appeared in Malice Domestic 6, edited by Anne Perry, in April 1997, won the Macavity Award and was nominated for both the Agatha and Arthur Ellis awards. It was also performed, with music and songs by Eliza Carthy, at the Beverley Folk Festival, Yorkshire, in 2006. He has also performed with Eliza on a number of other occasions, and with her father, Martin Carthy, most recently at the Richmond Walking and Books Festival in September 2018.

His first collection of short stories, Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories, was published in 1998 by Crippen & Landru. An expanded version, including the Banks novella Going Back, was published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Macmillan in the UK in September, 2004. Murder in Utopia won Robinson his fifth Ellis Award in 2001, and the same year Missing in Action won the Edgar Award. In 2007, Robinson edited the The Penguin Book of Crime Stories, which was published to great critical acclaim. His second collection of short stories, The Price of Love, was published in 2009.

Read more about Peter Robinson at: inspectorbanks.com .