Biography
McDermid comes from Kirkcaldy, Fife, and was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she was the first student from a state school in Scotland (Kirkcaldy High School), and became President of the Junior Common Room. After graduation she became a journalist, and worked briefly as a dramatist. However, her first success as a novelist, Report for Murder: The First Lindsay Gordon Mystery, did not appear until 1987.
McDermid was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Sunderland in 2011.
Read more about this topic: Val McDermid
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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