Mark Douglas-Home

Mark Douglas-Home (born 31 August 1951) is an author and journalist. His first novel, The Sea Detective, was published in May 2011. The Scotsman said it 'raises the bar' for Scottish crime fiction. A sequel, The Woman Who Walked Into The Sea, was published in April 2013 ('simply intoxicating,' according to the Library Journal in the USA). As a journalist, he is best known for having been the editor of The Herald newspaper in Scotland.^[1]

The son of Edward Charles Douglas-Home and Nancy Rose Straker-Smith, he was educated at Eton College and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the editor of the then fervently anti-apartheid student newspaper, Wits Student. (An unrepentant Douglas-Home was deported from South Africa in 1970 by the government of the day, following a series of anti-government cartoons that were deemed offensive by Pretoria.) He was a reporter for the North London Weekly Herald, the Sunday Express, and the Edinburgh Evening News. He went on to serve as Scotland Correspondent for The Independent, news editor and assistant editor for The Scotsman, deputy editor of the Scotland on Sunday, and editor of the Sunday Times Scotland.

Douglas-Home was appointed editor of The Herald, a nationally-circulated broadsheet newspaper in Scotland, in 2000. During his tenure the paper introduced new daily themed magazines, and continued to sell more than The Scotsman. It was announced on 1 December 2005 that he was leaving the paper. It was rumoured to be because of his unhappiness at budget cuts imposed on the paper by owners Newsquest.

The noble title, the Earl of Home in the Peerage of Scotland, belongs to his family, and his cousin, David Alexander Cospatrick Douglas-Home is the current holder. His uncle, the previous holder, was Alec Douglas-Home, a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is married to Northern Irish journalist Colette Douglas-Home - who is a columnist for the Herald newspaper. The couple have two children called Rebecca Douglas-Home and Rory Douglas-Home.

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