Writing Spies in the Shadow of Bond

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From the very beginning of fiction, writers have plundered the world of spies, but for decades one spy dominated them all. Now though, espionage fiction is changing. Spies aren’t superheroes deploying magical gadgets. They’re flawed humans, doing a difficult but necessary job the hard way. The three bestselling authors on this panel have written spies operating in every kind of setting – from the historical to a future dystopia. Join them to talk about the enduring lure of spy fiction – past, present and future. 

Named “the new queen of spy fiction” by the Guardian, Ava Glass’s novel The Chase is being made into a TV series by the team behind the BBC adaptation of Le Carre’s The Night Manager while Glass’s 2023 novel The Traitor was a Washington Post Thriller of the Year, and selected by The Times, Sunday Times and Financial Times as a thriller of the month, as well as being a Richard & Judy book club pick. Praised by everyone from Lee Child to Anthony Horowitz, Greg Mosse’s The Coming Darkness put the term ‘cli-fi’ on the map. Jack Jewers’ The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys imagines the real-life diarist plunged into the murky world of spies and secret agents in 1660s England.