Elly Griffiths
Domenica de Rosa, writing under the pen name of Elly Griffiths, is a British crime writer, best known for her Ruth Galloway series. She has written five series, and is an award winning author of 37 books.
Read MoreDomenica de Rosa, writing under the pen name of Elly Griffiths, is a British crime writer, best known for her Ruth Galloway series. She has written five series, and is an award winning author of 37 books.
Read More
Elly Griffiths was born in London in 1963 and grew up in Brighton after moving to the area with her family when she was five. After studying English at Kings College in London, she moved on to working in a library, and then in publishing for a magazine and as a publicity assistant at HarperCollins. She eventually moved up to the role of Editorial Director for children’s books at HarperCollins which put her off writing for several years.
Elly Griffiths’ wrote her first book when she was 11 – a murder mystery set in Rottingdean, near the village she lives in. Then in secondary school, she wrote fan episodes of Starsky and Hutch, where she realised she enjoyed making her readers cry.
It wasn’t until she was on maternity leave in 1988 that she wrote what became her first published novel, The Italian Quarter (now published as Return to the Italian Quarter) under her real name, Domenica de Rosa. Three books followed, all published under her real name.
On a family holiday and through a conversation with her husband, Dr Ruth Galloway was born. While Elly didn’t think of the first in the series The Crossing Places as different to her Italian series, her agent told her she needed a crime name to go with the crime novel. This is where her pen name was born.
Elly Griffiths’ first series featured forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway. Set in the remote seaside village of King’s Lynn in Norfolk, Galloway teaches at the University of North Norfolk. Griffiths was inspired by her husband who gave up his city job to train as an archaeologist, as well as her aunt who lived on the Norfolk coast, and who Griffiths credits as filling her head with myths and legends of the area.
Her second series focuses on Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens and magician Max Mephisto. The first book in this series, The Zig Zag Girl, was published in 2014.
In 2017, Elly Griffiths was the Programming Chair for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime writing festival. In 2020 she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel for The Stranger Diaries and in 2021, she was shortlisted in the Gold Dagger award at the Crime Writers’ Association Awards for The Postscript Murders.