Born in County Durham, Myers became interested in the local hardcore punk music scene as a teenager, forming the band Sour Face and penning pieces for Melody Maker from the notorious Oval Mansions squat in London. Myers soon became a prolific writer writing for numerous magazines and other publications as well as producing volumes of poetry and non-fiction. His breakthrough came in 2012 with the publication of his third novel Pig Iron, a violent and hard-hitting account of the traveller community which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. Pig Iron was followed by Beastings (2014) and two Yorkshire-set crime novels featuring D.I. Jim Brindle, before The Gallows Pole cemented his reputation as the master of ‘rural noir.’ A tour de force of a historical novel based on the true story of the eighteenth-century Cragg Vale Coiners, it won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2018. Subsequent novels The Offing (2019), The Perfect Golden Circle (2022) and Cuddy (2023) have all met with widespread acclaim, as has his collection of short stories Male Tears (2021).
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