Mick Herron

Michael Herron (born 11 July 1963) is a British mystery and thriller novelist. He is the author of the Slough House series, which has been adapted into the Slow Horses television series. He won the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger for Dead Lions and the Diamond Dagger in 2025 for lifetime achievement.

Early life Herron was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in English. He is one of six children; his father was an optician and his mother a nursery-school teacher.

Career Herron was a subeditor at IDS Employment Law Brief (Incomes Data Services), a trade journal on U.K. employment law.

Herron commuted from Oxford to London daily, returned home around 6 p.m., and wrote for an hour. In 2002, Herron had an office on a floor with few people, eventually hot-desking on a floor with hundreds of people. Herron resigned from IDS Employment Law Brief in 2017.

After the 7 July 2005 London bombings, as a London-Oxford commuter, he wanted to write about the UK security services.

In 2010, he began the Slough House spy series with the first volume, Slow Horses. The series concerns MI5 agents who have been exiled from the agency mainstream for various failures. The second volume, Dead Lions, published in 2013, won the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger. , the series includes nine novels, plus several associated novellas. Early volumes were been adapted for television as Slow Horses.

Slow Horses was published by Constable in 2010, but the firm declined the opportunity to publish the next book in the series in the United Kingdom due to disappointing sales. and John Murray started republishing the series in the UK from 2015.

Herron's short stories have been regularly published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and some are collected in the book All the Livelong Day, published in 2013.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.