Louise Penny

Louise Penny is a Canadian author of mystery novels set in the Canadian province of Quebec centered on the work of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Penny's first career was as a radio broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. After she turned to writing, she won numerous awards for her work, including the Agatha Award for best mystery novel of the year for four consecutive years (2007–2010) and the Anthony Award for two novels. Her novels have been published in 23 languages.

Penny was born in Toronto in 1958. Her mother was an avid reader of both fiction and non-fiction, with a particular liking for crime fiction, and Louise grew up reading mystery writers such as Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Michael Innes.

Penny earned a Bachelor of Applied Arts (Radio and Television) from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in 1979. After graduation, at age 21, she embarked on an 18-year career as a radio host and journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. At the start of her broadcasting career, Penny took postings at locations far from friends and family, and to help deal with feelings of loneliness and isolation, she increasingly turned to alcohol. At age 35, she admitted to an alcohol problem and has been sober since. Shortly afterward, she met her future husband, Michael Whitehead, head of hematology at Montreal Children's Hospital, on a blind date.

After her marriage, Penny left the CBC to take up writing. Although she started a historical novel, she had difficulty finishing it, and eventually switched to mystery writing. She entered her first novel, "Still Life," in the "Debut Dagger" competition in the United Kingdom, placing second out of 800 entries. The novel won other awards, including the "New Blood" Dagger award in the United Kingdom, the Arthur Ellis Award in Canada for best first crime novel, the Dilys Award, the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel in the United States.

Penny has published a further fifteen novels, garnering major crime novel award nominations for almost every one of her novels and subsequently winning several of those awards.

Her oeuvre features Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec. Although set in the province of Quebec, the novels feature many hallmarks of the British whodunit genre, including murders by unconventional means, bucolic villages, large casts of suspects, red herrings and a dramatic disclosure of the murderer in the last few pages of the book.

In 2009, Penny helped to launch a new award for aspiring Canadian mystery writers, the Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Novel.

In 2013, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada "for her contributions to Canadian culture as an author shining a spotlight on the Eastern Townships of Quebec."

In 2013, "Still Life" was made into a movie for CBC TV with British actor Nathaniel Parker cast as Chief Inspector Gamache.