Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock and now lives in Glasgow. He is the author of five novels and a novella. His novels are His Bloody Project, Case Study and the French-set Gorski trilogy, the final part of which A Case of Matricide was published in October 2024. His novella Benbecula was published in October 2025 in Polygon’s Darklands series. The Guardian called it ‘intense and utterly compelling.’
His Bloody Project was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize, the LA Times Mystery Book of the Year and the European Crime Fiction prize and won the Saltire Prize for Fiction. It was variously described as ‘astonishing’, ‘fiendishly readable’ and ‘spellbinding’. Case Study was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022. Hannah Kent called it ‘a novel of mind-bending brilliance.’ The Financial Times declared A Case of Matricide ‘a triumph’. It won the Australian Crime Writers Best International Crime award.
Graeme’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and he has appeared at festivals all over the world.
His Bloody Project
Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae: 10th Anniversary Edition
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s propulsive, Booker-shortlisted contemporary classic – reissued to mark its tenth anniversary.
The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country’s finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence.
Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows. Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear.
His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.
Prizes and awards
Booker Prize 2016: Shortlisted
Scotland's National Book Awards 2016: Fiction Book of the Year: Winner
Los Angeles Times Book Awards 2016: Finalist
REVIEWS OF His Bloody Project
‘A smart amalgam of legal thriller and literary game that reads as if Umberto Eco has been resurrected in the 19th-century Scottish Highlands’. Mark Lawson, The Guardian
‘A brilliantly written story of rural hardship, fractured community and eventual, inescapable bloodshed.’ Ian Rankin, The Guardian
‘Rich, atmospheric … unsettling and impossible to put down.’ The Times, best historical novels of the decade
