Ajay Chowdhury is the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland crime fiction award. He is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director who was born in India and now lives in London where he builds digital businesses, cooks experimental dishes for his wife and daughters and writes through the night. His children's book, Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical.

The Waiter, published in 2021, is the first in his warm, funny and spicy adult crime series about Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Calcutta who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It has been optioned for television by Moonage Pictures. Follow up, The Cook, was published in May 2022 to critical acclaim and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book on the series - The Detective - is about government surveillance and will be published in April 2023.