Best-selling author awarded MBE

The Yorkshire-born novelist, whose book Case Histories has just been televised on BBC1, is famously protective of her privacy.

A spokeswoman said the writer would “prefer not to comment” about the honour for services to literature.

Atkinson went to university in Dundee and now lives in Edinburgh – a city she has used as a backdrop for several of her novels.

Her first novel, Behind The Scenes At The Museum, made her name and thrust her to the top of the best-seller charts when it won the Whitbread Prize in 1995.

In 2004 she published her first book featuring policeman turned private detective Jackson Brodie.

Three more Brodie books followed in quick succession.

The books are not conventional crime thrillers, with one journalist writing that comparing Atkinson to a standard crime writer is “like comparing a Scottish First Division team to the way Spain played in this year’s World Cup”.