Joan Smith is a novelist, essayist, columnist and campaigner for human rights. She has published six novels, including the Loretta Lawson series of crime novels and a widely-acclaimed thriller set in Westminster and Lebanon, What Will Survive. Her non-fiction includes includes Misogynies, Hungry For You and Moralities.

Her columns have appeared in The Times, Guardian, Independent and Independent on Sunday, Evening Standard and Tribune, where she wrote every month for 11 years. She reviews books for national newspapers and appears regularly on current affairs programes such as Woman’s Hour (Radio 4) and Nightwaves (Radio 3). Her short story ‘Fascinating Marion’ was read on Radio 4 in April 2011. She was a judge of the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation 2011.

In May 2011 she was shown evidence by detectives from Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police inquiry into phone hacking, which suggested that her voicemals had been intercepted in 2004 by a private detective working for the News of the World. She gave evidence to Lord Leveson’s inquiry in November 2011, and accepted an apology and compensation from News International at the High Court in January 2012.

In 2010 she was elected to the board of ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society); two years later, she became chair of its R&D committee. In 2010 she also became President of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, an umbrella organisation which represents more than 100,000 individual creators. She chaired the English PEN Writers in Prison Committee from 2000 to 2004, and was a member of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office free expression panel from 2002 to 2004.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. She supports Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state, and is a patron of the Iris Project to bring Latin and Greek back into state schools (http://www.irisonline.org.uk/).

From 2002 to 2005 she was adjunct associate .professor at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and returned there as a visiting scholar in March-April 2011. She has campaigned for modernisation of the honours system, and turned down an MBE in 2003. She has also campaigned against sex trafficking, and for criminal pemalties for men who pay for sex.

Two of her Loretta Lawson novels, A Masculine Ending and Don’t Leave Me This Way, have been filmed for BBC television and starred Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Janet McTeer. She contributed a short story to In Bed With, a collection of erotic fiction edited by Kathy Lette and others.

Joan Smith has written a new Loretta Lawson novel, set in London after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on the transport system. It’s called Bombshell and you can read an exclusive extract on the Loretta Lawson page of this website. She lives in London.