In February 2013, crime writer Val McDermid was invited to speak at the University of Oxford. “It was at my old college of St Hilda’s,” she says. When she spotted she had been tagged on Twitter by an attendee, she felt nervous. “I’d had an unfortunate incident a few months before – someone had thrown ink in my face at a signing,” she says. “This tweet had a cartoon profile image rather than a picture, so I looked her up to make sure she was a real person.”
She discovered her new Twitter fan was Jo Sharp, a geography professor from Glasgow. “I was in Oxford doing some research,” says Jo. “I’d contacted a professor I knew there, to meet up. She told me she was going to see Val McDermid speak and I could come along.” Jo decided to go even though she had not read any of Val’s books. She tweeted the details of the event, tagging Val in her post. “My friend was a huge fan of her writing, so we stayed afterwards to be introduced,” says Jo. When she told Val she wasn’t from Oxford, Val admitted she already knew. “I told her I’d Googled her,” she laughs. “There was definitely something that caught my attention.”
