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.”
In March, they met again at the Aye Write literature festival in Glasgow. Once again, they had a brief chat and exchanged a few messages on Twitter. It wasn’t until September 2013 that they got to know each other better at Bloody Scotland, a crime-writing festival in Stirling. “By this point, my friends were joking that I was stalking Val,” says Jo. They met up at a bar and chatted all evening. “We talked about all sorts: music, books, politics, gaming,” says Val. “We covered a lot of ground over the course of a few hours. I was intrigued by her, and she had lots to say for herself.”
At the time, neither of them saw each other romantically, which made their meet-up more relaxed. Jo was happily single and focusing on her career, while Val was coming towards the end of a long-term relationship. The following month, Jo travelled to Tanzania for a field trip, and their friendship continued to grow. “We broke Twitter because we were sending so many direct messages,” says Val. “Apparently there’s a limit on the number you can send.” Soon, they began to realise there might be more between them than friendship. “We were having these increasingly intense conversations,” says Jo. “Val really understood me.”
That January, Val’s relationship ended. She drove to Glasgow from her home in Northumberland to see Jo, and from that moment on they were never apart.
In May 2014, they moved in together in Edinburgh. “I grew up on the east coast and it’s less rainy,” laughs Val. They had a humanist civil partnership ceremony in 2016, which they celebrated with dinner and drinks near their home. “It ran from noon until 11pm, and the London contingent staggered out of the restaurant at the end of the night to get the sleeper [train] home,” says Val. “The whole day was joyous. I don’t think I stopped grinning,” adds Jo.
Both describe their relationship as “incredibly supportive”. About a year after they first met at Val’s speaking event in Oxford, Jo remembers stumbling across a photo of them together there. “It felt like a moment in history for us,” she says. “Neither of us was looking for anything, but our worlds just collided that day.”
Val McDermid’s latest thriller, 1989, is out now. To support the Guardian, buy your copy from bookshop.theguardian.com
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• This article was amended on 22 December 2022 to correct the spelling of the city of Stirling.
