Bestselling author Elly Griffiths has spoken of her joy after winning one of Britain’s most prestigious literary prizes – after being nominated a record eight times in 16 years. Having been on the shortlist for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year more than anyone else, the Ruth Galloway creator admitted she had given up hope of ever winning it.
“It just feels incredible. I’ve been nominated eight times – which I’ve never taken for granted, I’ve always been really grateful to be shortlisted, because look how many brilliant books there are out there,” says Elly. “I’d come to accept I was never going to win and I was okay with that. I had my supportive face on for the winner – so to win was just incredible!”
The award, supported by the Express, is now in its 22nd year and previous winners include luminaries of crime fiction such as Val McDermid, Lee Child and Denise Mina. However, it took the “risky” move of ending her bestselling Norfolk-set thrillers starring forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway to launch a new series featuring a time-travelling cop to finally bag the gong.
In a talent-packed shortlist that included Slow Horses creator Mick Herron and Netflix smash hit drama His & Hers creator Alice Feeney, Elly’s new book, The Frozen People, won her the £3,000 prize and hand-crafted Theakston beer cask.
“Ending the Ruth series did feel like a risk,” Elly, 62, from Brighton, admitted. “Not only a new series, but time travel! And to put time travel in a crime series is a risk – you’re asking your readers to take quite a big leap of faith with you and I’m just really grateful so many did.”
The Frozen People features 50-something London detective Ali Dawson, a thoroughly modern woman, who works for a secretive cold case unit of the Met Police. At the request of a politician, Ali is sent back in time to 1850 to investigate a murder, setting in train a unique take on crime fiction set against a pivotal moment in UK history. Inspirations included the acclaimed TV dramas Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, starring Philip Glenister, Keeley Hawes and John Simm as a modern cop who goes back to the Seventies and Eighties.
“I’d always wanted to write a time travel book because I love the idea of time travel,” Elly continues. “There are loads of good time travel books for children – Tom’s Midnight Garden, Travelers in Time and Charlotte Sometimes. So I always had in my head those three words “time-travelling detective” in my head, and occasionally I would try it out on my editor Jane Wood and say, “Time-travelling detective,” and she’d say, ‘Next Ruth book, please!’
“I knew that I had to find the right character. I thought that I had to find a really grounded, really modern character so believable that people would believe that she could travel in time. I just had a vision of Ali walking down a road in East London, she had this bright red hair, she had a nose ring, leather jacket, she was quite cool, 50-something, married three times.
“Everyone remembers Gene Hunt and his cars from Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes – he was such an extraordinary character, and no one really remembers how time travelling came about.”
Simon Theakston presents Elly Griffiths with her beer cask at the Harrogate crime writing festival 2026 (Image: Gerard Binks)
That suited Elly, who didn’t want to get bogged down in science. As she puts it, thinking too hard about time travel can “fry your brain”. “Someone said my explanation of the time travelling was elegantly vague,” she smiles.
Having decided to send Ali back to the 1850s and Victorian London, the mother-of-two threw herself into the research.
“The 19th century is one of my favourite periods and years ago I did a Master’s in 19th-century literature. So I researched the clothes and the food, and the street chants, the things sellers shout in the street – that’s where I came across the fact that you could buy hot sheep’s feet… just how hungry would you have to be?”
The Frozen People features a secretive group of men known as The Collectors who may be involved in questionable and possibly occult gatherings.
“The Collectors came from my husband, Andy, who’s an archaeologist, but was for a long time archaeology curator at Brighton Museum,” explains Elly. “He told me about these odd little collections in lots of British museums that are not on display because the provenance is dodgy. In Andy’s office at Brighton, he had a mummified cat!
“But I think there are many things in Victorian times that we would be shocked about, and things that we can’t know. It would have been very alien to us today. And I was interested in how people sounded. There’s a running joke that nobody can understand Ali and she says she’s from Hastings and that explains it. I don’t know why I picked on Hastings – my mum was born in Hastings – but there’s something called the ‘great vowel shift’ that happens in the four centuries leading up to this.”
The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths (Quercus, £9.99) is out (Image: Quercus)
Following the success of The Frozen People, which came out last year, Elly published a sequel, The Killing Time, set against the backdrop of The Great Exhibition, earlier this year. An Ali Dawson novella, which features Charles Dickens, The Case of the Christmas Card, is due out before Christmas. “I bring Charles Dickens to modern London and, of course, the big shock for him is going to be The Muppet Christmas Carol,” she chuckles.
Ali Dawson will return again next year in a new full-length book set in 1940 and featuring the London Blitz. “Its quite liberating to have all these historical backdrops to write against,” says Elly. “I always knew when Elly bought a house in the East End that she would, at one point, find herself in the Blitz.”
At the opening of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate on Thursday night, superstar US thriller writer David Baldacci, who received the Outstanding Contribution Award, told the audience about his battle against AI in the States.
Baldacci, 65, is part of a major lawsuit, alongside the likes of John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin, against the likes of OpenAI for allegedly stealing the work of authors.
Does Elly think writers need to take similar action in the UK? “I think there needs to be some reckoning,” she says. “There needs to be some acknowledgment that it was wrong, that it was a theft. Whether we’d ever get any compensation, I don’t know, but I think there needs to be some sort of reckoning.”
For now Elly’s concentrating on her writing and the possibility of TV adaptations of her books.
“Mick Herron and I used to have a little joke here every year that neither of us had ever won the Theakstons and neither of us had been on TV, and we used to say that’s never going to happen,” she smiles. “Well, now we’ve both won the Theakstons and I do believe Mick’s books are on TV! So never say never!”
• The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths (Quercus, £9.99) is out now