Claire Askew Books in Order

If you want the DI Helen Birch series from the beginning: All the Hidden Truths → What You Pay For → Cover Your Tracks → A Matter of Time
If you want the most intense, clock-ticking thriller: A Matter of Time → The Dead Don't Speak → Line of Sight
If you want Claire Askew as a poet first: This Changes Things → How to burn a woman
If you want a practical writing guide: Novelista

Claire Askew was born in 1986 and grew up in the rural Scottish Borders. She moved to Edinburgh for university, stayed there for sixteen years, and later relocated to Cumbria. Scotland, especially Edinburgh and the Borders, runs through a lot of her work.

Writing seems to have started early. As a child she was given a typewriter by her parents, and while at university she began collecting them. Before readers met her as a crime novelist, she had already spent years in Scotland's poetry and spoken-word scene, building the kind of ear for rhythm and precision that still shows up in her prose.

Edinburgh shaped her in a practical way too. Askew took a Scottish master's degree in English Literature, an MSc in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. She later came back as Writer in Residence, which gives her career a tidy full-circle quality.

She has always moved between writing and teaching. Her nonfiction guide Novelista grew out of more than a decade of teaching creative writing, and that background is all over the book. It is direct, friendly, and much more interested in helping people get started than in treating writing as some mysterious gift.

Her move into crime fiction landed decisively with All the Hidden Truths. The novel won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize as a work in progress, and later picked up the McIlvanney Debut Award. Askew has said the book grew partly from Scotland's lasting memory of Dunblane, and partly from her own experience working at a further education college, where she saw how group behaviour among young men could change fast and turn ugly.

She doesn't really separate art from aftermath.

That helps explain why the DI Helen Birch novels, including What You Pay For, Cover Your Tracks, A Matter of Time, The Dead Don't Speak, and Line of Sight, feel different from more puzzle-first crime series. Readers usually come for the investigation and stay for the emotional weight: grief, family strain, public blame, moral compromise, and the long shadow violence leaves behind. Two of her crime novels have been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.

Poetry never went away.

This Changes Things, her first full poetry collection, came after years of work in the spoken-word world and focuses on women, class, power, and the uneasy limits of empathy. How to burn a woman turns to witches, outsiders, love, and the long history of punishing women who do not fit the mould. It later won Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, which fits a collection so interested in power, resilience, and what gets remembered.

Alongside the books, there is a steady line of public literary work. Askew has been a Scottish Book Trust Reading Champion, a Jessie Kesson Fellow, and Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, and she has worked with schools and community groups as well as university writers. Now based in Cumbria, she keeps moving between crime, poetry, and nonfiction without seeming especially interested in staying in one lane. That range is a big part of what makes her worth following.