The Winner

CJ Parsons was born in Britain and grew up in Canada. She graduated from Montreal's McGill University with a degree in psychology and went on to earn a graduate degree in journalism. She worked as a newspaper reporter at Canada's Globe and Mail before moving to Hong Kong, where she became a columnist at the South China Morning Post.

After returning to Britain, she moved into television news, working as a broadcast journalist for both the BBC and CNN International. She also spent two years covering crime, seeing first-hand the disturbing forces that drive people to kill, something that inspired her first novel, The Good Samaritan, published by Headline in November 2020.

CJ is now deputy executive producer at CGTN. She lives in north London with her fourteen-year-old.