This Door of the Seas:

Val McDermid & Jo Sharp in conversation with Nicola Meighan

Val McDermid and Jo Sharp discuss This Door of the Seas, their co-authored book, (sparked by an idea they had at Winter Words Festival 2025!).

The event offers an opportunity to explore the ideas and stories behind their latest collaboration, alongside McDermid’s wide-ranging body of work across crime fiction, historical novels and non-fiction.

One of the UK’s most accomplished and respected novelists, number one bestseller Val McDermid has sold over 19 million books to date across the globe and her work has been translated into more than 40 languages. She has written five series of crime novels as well as several award-winning standalone novels, books of non-fiction, short story collections and a children’s picture book, My Granny is a Pirate. Her latest Karen Pirie novel, Silent Bones, published in October 2025 followed by Winter, her celebration of a season, in November 2025. 2026 saw the publication of Silent Bones in paperback in June and then in August, This Door of the Seas, co-authored by Val and her partner Jo Sharp. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and has been a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, as well as chairing the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is also the recipient of eight honorary doctorates, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford and a Professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Jo Sharp is a Scottish geographer. She researches and writes on geopolitics and feminist geography. In April 2022 she became Geographer Royal for Scotland, the first woman to hold the title.

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