Victor Pavic Lundberg’s Aftermath was crowned the winner of Gothenburg Book Fair’s Crime Time Award for Best Crime Novel Debut in an award ceremony this week. BookBeat’s award for Swedish Detective Writer of the Year went to Sofie Sarenbrant; Anders Sparring was awarded Children's Novelist of the Year; and Åsa Larsson also received an Honorary Award. For the eighth year in a row, the Crimetime Award was presented at Sweden’s largest detective festival, Crimetime, held as part of the Book Fair in Gothenburg. The Crimetime Awards were established in 2015 and have previously been awarded to authors such as May Sjöwall and Liza Marklundand.
Hachette UK’s Future Bookshelf announced the shortlist for the Mo Siewcharran Prize, including Arranged Murder by Faaiza Munir; Incarnations of an English Subject by Kalbinder Dayal; The Labelled Bones by Felicity Yeoh; The Search for Othella Savage by Foday Mannah; and Their Unseen Truth by Kingsley Pearson. Now in its third year, the Future Bookshelf launched the Mo Siewcharran Prize to help discover unpublished fiction writers from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. The initiative, named in memory of Nielsen Book’s former director of marketing and communications, aims to nurture talent from under-represented backgrounds writing in English. This year, the prize is hosted by Quercus Books and in a change from previous years, organizers were looking for fiction writing in the crime and thriller genre specifically.
Penguin Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Random House, revealed details of their new writers’ prize, the Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers Prize, which aims to find new authors from underrepresented backgrounds who the division can bring to the widest possible readership. The inaugural prize (2022/2023) focuses on the crime and thriller genre, with budding writers being invited to submit tales of mysteries, crimes, jeopardy, action or adventure. The prize is aimed at unpublished writers aged 18 and over who are currently a resident in the UK or ROI, and who are from a background that’s currently underrepresented in publishing, which includes ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, disability or socio-economic background. Entries will be judged by a panel of judges led by PMJ’s Crime and Thriller publisher, Joel Richardson; bestselling author, Amy McCulloch; award-winning freelance crime fiction critic/commentator, moderator and blogger, Ayo Onatade; Waterstones’ Head of Fiction, Bea Carvalho; award-winning bookseller, owner of Goldsboro Books and agent at D H H Literary Agency, David Headley; and Syima Aslam, the founder and Director of the Bradford Literature Festival. The winner will receive a publishing contract with PMJ, worth at least £10,000, and representation by the DHH Literary Agency. For more information about applications, follow this link. The deadline for submissions is November 30, 2022, and the winner of the Prize will be announced in August 2023. (HT to Shots Magazine)
Noir at the Bar events are cranking up again with the return of autumn beginning tonight in Toronto at Duke of Kent at 7pm with readings by Lisa de Nikolits, John McFetridge, Scott McKinnon, Rob Brunet, Lynne Murphy, Amy Tector, and JJ Dupuis. Then on October 20, it moves to Hillsborough, NC, at Yonder Southern Cocktails & Brew with authors Natania Barron, Jesse Bullington, Rob Hart, Todd Robinson, and Endless Will. Finally, Noir at the Bar L.A. returns on November 6th at the Mandrake Bar with readings from Lawrence Allan, Eric Beetner, Jennifer J Chow, Ashley Erwin, Adam Frost, Rachel Howzell Hall, Katy Munger, August Norman, Eryk Pruitt, Sascha Rothchild, and J August Williams. There's something for everyone at these readings, with hardboiled, cozy, suspense, grit lit, and more. All events are free and open to the public.
Writing for Flatwater Free Press, Carson Vaughan profiled legendary crime writer, Jim Thompson (1906 to 1977), who has largely been neglected in his home state of Nebraska (a University of Nebraska-Lincoln alum who spent much of his childhood in Burwell). Seventy years ago this month, a 25-cent paperback by Thompson called The Killer Inside Me hit newsstands across the country. Featuring a shadowy montage of noir staples – a burning cigarette, a bottle of whiskey, a hint of cleavage and a pool of blood – the cover promised "a novel of murder unlike any you’ve ever read." Thompson’s novel has since become a staple of the genre and cult classic, with famed director, Stanley Kubrick, saying it was "probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." Horror icon Stephen King, in his foreword to the latest reissue, called it "an American classic, no less, a novel that deserves space on the same shelf with Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Sun Also Rises, and As I Lay Dying." The book has now been published in more than twenty languages, and twice adapted for the silver screen.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Bomb Threat" by Robert Cooperman.
In the Q&A roundup, Lisa Haselton interviewed mystery author, Frank Zafiro, about the newest book in his River City police procedural series, The Worst Kind of Truth; and on the Writers Who Kill blog, E. B. Davis interviewed Korina Moss, author of the cozy mystery, Gone for Gouda.
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