Marsali grew up near Edinburgh, Scotland. Her summer family
holidays were spent in a remote cottage in the West Highlands, the
region where her detective Gavin Macrae lives. Like her sailing
heroine, Cass, she has always been used to boats, and used her 'gap
year' earnings to buy her first sailing dinghy, Lady Blue. She
studied English at Dundee University, did a year of teacher
training and took up her first post, teaching English and French to
secondary children in Aith, Shetland. Gradually her role expanded
to doing drama too, and both primary and secondary pupils have won
prizes performing her plays at the local Drama Festival. Some of
these plays were in Shetlandic, the local dialect.
Marsali teaches dinghy sailing at her local club, and is a keen
single-handed sailor in her Offshore 8 m yacht, Karima S - the
double of Cass's Khalida.
A qualified STGA green badge tourist guide for Shetland, she now
spends a good deal of her summer sharing her home with visitors
from overseas. She is particularly interested in women's history,
and has published Women's Suffrage in Shetland, two years' worth of
original research. She followed this with The Story of Busta House,
the romantic tale of the house which is the setting for part of
Death on a Longship.
Marsali also writes for the monthly magazine Shetland Life - a
mixture of travel writing, interviews, investigative journalism and
historical research.
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