The British Book Awards announced the winners of this year's contest last week. Top honors in the Crime & Thriller category went to Robert Galbraith (a/k/a JK Rowling) for Troubled Blood. The other finalists included: The Sentinel by Lee Child and Andrew Child; The Patient Man by Joy Ellis; The Guest List by Lucy Foley; The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman; and A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin.
The International Crime Fiction Research Group posted an overview of crime fiction in Argentina, noting that Argentinian fiction has been characterized as peripheral in the global domain even though this country presents a vigorous and complex tradition in the genre."
Rachel Mills Literary Agency and adult education centre Morley College are launching the BME Unpublished Fiction Prize, a contest for aspiring writers from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds seeking to break into publishing. The annual prize will award £500 to a previously unpublished author, and is intended to nurture and provide opportunities for aspiring novelists, promote diverse fiction across the broader literary landscape of Britain, and support Morley College’s ambitions to build an annual festival celebrating diversity in Britain. Applicants should submit a manuscript of the first 30 to 50 pages of an original novel, as well as a three-page maximum outline of the whole plot of the novel. Applications close on August 22.
A literary auction raising money to help vaccinate the world against coronavirus offer opportunities for book lovers to win signed novels by authors including Hilary Mantel and Robert Galbraith, as well as mentoring sessions from star publishers and agents. Bidding at Books for Vaccines runs until May 21. Since the auction is UK based, physical prizes can only be shipped to UK addresses, but the digital prizes such as Zoom calls, mentoring, and online critiques are open internationally. All money raised is going to Care International, a charity working to tackle vaccine inequality in poorer nations. (HT to The Guardian)
The American University in Dubai is hosting a Zoom conversation with Jasper Fforde (creator of Thursday Next), Leigh Perry (creator of Sid the Skeleton) and award-winning short story writer and editor, Josh Pachter, this Sunday, May 23, at 11 AM Eastern time. Registration is required but free, and you can sign up via this link.
One last final John le Carré novel, Silverview, is set to be published in October. Finished before his death in December, le Carré gave his blessing to publish the novel, which follows a bookseller who becomes embroiled in a spy leak. "The book is fraught, forensic, lyrical, and fierce, at long last searching the soul of the modern Secret Intelligence Service itself. It’s a superb and fitting final novel," said his youngest son Nick Cornwell, a novelist who writes under the pen name of Nick Harkaway. "This is the authentic le Carré, telling one more story."
Since my late mother was a librarian, I'm rather pleased to see Janet Rudolph's list of Library/Librarian Mysteries over at the Mystery Fanfare blog.
Nick Pirog, bestselling author of the Thomas Prescott series, the 3:00 a.m. series, and The Speed of Souls, applied the Page 69 Test to his new thriller, Jungle Up.
Art thieves have a new reason to look over their shoulder. Interpol’s new ID-Art app allows amateur sleuths, collectors, and dealers to access the international organization’s database of 52,000 stolen artworks. This official catalogue runs the gamut from looted antiquities to the subjects of well-known heists, such as Vincent van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884), which was stolen from a Netherlands museum during Covid-19 lockdown.
I didn't know that book nook shelf inserts were a thing, but apparently they are; and some of them are actually pretty clever.
This sounds like it came right out of a crime caper novel: A man suspected of burglarizing a Milwaukee bakery has been arrested after the owners of the establishment cooked up a scheme to identify the thief by printing his image on their sugar cookies.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Food Shopping in a Time of Pandemic" by Robert Cooperman.
In the Q&A roundup, Megan Abbott chatted with CrimeReads about her writing process, making "weird" choices, and her Diet Coke habit; and Author Interviews spoke with Linda L. Richards about her new novel, Endings, which follows a woman who reinvents herself as a killer for hire.
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