Mallorca has been a magnet and a haven for British writers for decades, centuries, and now there appears to be a whole new generation of novelists on the island. Ali Steed is an accomplished writer, editor, and broadcaster, and she has worked as a journalist - both in-house and freelance - for most of the UK’s national newspapers, as well as the BBC, Channel 4, and local TV and radio stations.
She has won eight awards for her journalism, and her debut novel, All It Takes, won Best Indie Book Award (BIBA) winner Suspense/Thrillers 2024, and the Global Book Awards Silver medal in Mystery - Police Procedurals 2025, competing in both against entries from across the world. This is the first book in the DCI Caroline Cramer series, with more titles to come; the second should in fact be on sale in time for Christmas.
More titles to come
“My specialty has been and is finance. But I do a much wider range of things with corporate work. It’s still primarily finance, I write a lot about tax - for my sins - and I do have a specialty in offshore. When I was deputy editor of the personal finance section on the Daily Telegraph, I got the editor’s job of the personal finance section of the Weekly Telegraph, which was the offshore paper, so I have done an awful lot of offshore finance work,” she explained to the Bulletin. Ali is originally from Oxfordshire but went to London do her degree in journalism and stayed in London.
“Basically at that time if you wanted to be serious about journalism, you had to be in London.
“I started on a pensions magazine and from there I went to an FT group magazine and from there I was headhunted to go to the Telegraph. It was all quite quick as well. About 14 months after my first job I was at the Telegraph, and I was there for nearly seven years.
“Then I went freelance. I had been freelancing while doing all of my jobs, but I decided to go full time. But the freelance market has changed, hence why I am doing more corporate work. It’s super tough now, especially with the arrival of AI, which is still far from perfect but even some of the leading publications are using it and sometimes getting caught out, so one has to be careful. It’s a bit of a minefield at the moment,” she said. “It helps for research but I don’t use it for writing,” she added.
However, while triumphing on Fleet Street, Ali and her wife have always been hugely active, taking part in Ironman competitions, cycling, marathons and triathlons etc.; hence the Mallorca connection. “We actually started moving out here in 2019. We had been coming to the island for 20-odd years mainly for cycling and sports training. And there is no better place to train than here in Mallorca.
“So that’s one of the reasons, but we’d also wanted to move abroad for a long time but just never had enough of a push; Brexit gave us the push that we needed. We didn’t think that Brexit was a good idea and realised that it would have been easier to move before Brexit actually came into being. But the main reason is that we absolutely love Mallorca,” she added. “We had been thinking about moving for a good ten years but a job would always come up, plus we were running sporting events like triathlons, cycle races and runs in the UK. We were pretty busy, but when Covid came along that side of the business fell apart, so as triathlon coaches we wanted to come out here and offer sport coaching services while doing my day job as well.
“That is something we are starting full-on in the next year - sports training camps in the Portocolom area because it’s such a beautiful area and isn’t as busy as other areas such as Pollensa, for example. It’s going to be mostly cycling and swimming.” If all that is not enough to have on one’s plate, Ali’s main focus is on her journalism and writing books.
“I have one book which won two awards, my first book. That book I’d had in my head for longer than I care to remember, some 20 years since I first had the idea. I started taking it really seriously when my dad died in 2016. He was always really supportive of my writing and my career generally, and when he died it gave me a kick in the pants because I thought if I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it?
“So from 2016 onwards I really started taking the book-writing seriously and it was published in 2023.
“Set in and around Canterbury, Kent, it’s about a serial killer; it’s a crime book basically. A killer is taking women, holding then for five days and then they’re being found dead by the detective team looking into it. But in each case the victims are left with something that doesn’t belong to them and a quote from the King James Bible. To be honest I got a bit fed up with the typical detective who is an alcoholic, divorced, had problems - the typical stereotype. So mine is quite different.
Strong female detective lead
“I don’t want to give too much away but the first book in the series has a strong female British detective lead. She has a completely different background, is motivated to do the job for entirely different reasons. She does have some baggage, don’t get me wrong, but it’s definitely not the classic traditional.
“And the second book is a follow-on, the same genre. So it’s a detective series I’m writing at the moment. Cramer works with a forensic psychologist who she has know for a very long time and is more of a confidant than a person she just works with. The second book is actually with my editor right now. So far it’s looking good and I hope it’s going to be out by December. The title has yet to be decided on though,” Ali, who lives in Felanitx, said.
“It’s really nice for me to have won the awards for the books. I’ve won awards for journalism in the UK, but these are global and I’m genuinely thrilled about it. I really did struggle to put the book out because, as a journalist, you know how it is, most of the time you are effectively writing other people’s words, you are creating a ‘he said, she said’, this is how it’s laid out and someone makes their own mind up.
“That, I didn’t realise, was very different from writing and releasing a book until I tried to do it. I suddenly felt extremely exposed because it was coming out of my head. Everything had been made up by me, I’d created this world, these detectives, these people and it actually felt much more exposing. All of a sudden it was my mind, or my creation on paper. And that I found very difficult.
“So I ended up taking a rather unusual approach. A friend of mine is a Shamanic practitioner and she suggested I’d see her tutor. I did some training and I am now a trained Shamanic practitioner and I can help other people get through the kind of blocks that I had. It goes further than that, like helping people release trauma.
“That helped a great deal. Book three is already written. Book four is mostly completed. So I should have another three books to get out in quite quick succession; writing to deadline is not a problem for me. And once this series draws to an end, I am sure Mallorca will give me plenty of inspiration,” she said. The award-winning book is available on Amazon.