Ian James Rankin, OBE, DL, FRSE, is a Scottish crime writer, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels. He has also written several pieces of literary criticism.

Rankin did not set out to be a crime writer. He thought his first novels Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek were mainstream books, more in keeping with the Scottish traditions of Robert Louis Stevenson and even Muriel Spark (the subject of Rankin's uncompleted Ph.D. thesis). He was initially disconcerted by their classification as genre fiction, but later became reconciled when he realized that the statements he wanted to make about Scottish society were not going to be any less pertinent for their being contained in what was perceived as crime novels.

Rankin has received numerous awards and honors, including the 1997 CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction for Black and Blue, the 2003 French Grand Prix du Roman Noir, the 2004 Edgar Award for Resurrection Men, the 2005 CWA Lifetime Achievement Award (Cartier Diamond Dagger), the 2005 French Grand Prix du Roman Policier (France) for Set in Darkness, the 2005 Deutscher Krimi Preis (Germany) for Resurrection Men and the 2008 ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Author of the Year for Exit Music. In 2002, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature. In 2011, a group of ten book sculptures were deposited around Edinburgh as gifts to cultural institutions and the people of the city. Many of the sculptures made reference to the work of Rankin, and an eleventh sculpture was a personal gift to him.