Biographical briefing
From Oxford commuter to spy-fiction landmark
Mick Herron is a British novelist and short-story writer, born in Newcastle upon Tyne and educated at Oxford, where he studied English Literature and continues to live. Before writing full time he worked as a sub-editor in London, building his fiction around a daily routine of roughly 350 words.
His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, appeared in 2003 and began the Oxford-set Zoë Boehm sequence. Herron started writing the Slough House series in 2008, drawing on contemporary politics and the idea of intelligence officers exiled to an institutional backwater. Slow Horses was published in 2010.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have received major crime-writing honours including CWA Daggers and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, and have been published internationally. The Slough House books became Apple’s Slow Horses; the Zoë Boehm series has also been adapted for television as Down Cemetery Road.