Alan R. Hurndall

Alan has been a journalist all his working life, starting as a copy boy in Fleet Street, training on a local newspaper, and working on provincial and national titles. In the 1980s he switched to television, working as a scriptwriter for Thames Television and joining London Weekend Television as a Producer/Director, where he eventually became Head of News.

In the independent sector, he set up Britain's first cable sports channel for Chrysalis Television where among other projects he was a producer on Formula One for ITV and edited various series for Sky Sports, BBC and Channel Four. Setting up on his own, he made current affairs, sport, documentary and lifestyle programmes for all of Britain's main terrestrial channels. During his career he was named Campaigning Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards and won the Royal Television Society award for best sports film, about the air disaster which wiped out most of the Zambian national football team on the way to the World Cup. He was also nominated for a television BAFTA.

His first published book was as a ghost writer on behalf of the father of comedy genius Debbie Barham, The Invisible Girl, published by Harper. He had also edited Bad Lands, a tourist on the axis of evil, for Lonely Planet, and Street Kid for Harper Collins. Alan now specialises in writing True Crime. His first such book was Pottery Cottage, an investigation into the murders of a family in the Peak District in 1977, and in 2022 with The Crooked Spire Killings, about serial murders in the 1960s, the biggest investigation ever conducted by police in Derbyshire.

His latest work is a highly-acclaimed memoir of his childhood in South East London. The Kid From The Kiosk was described by one critic as a classic of its kind.