Nina Bhadreshwar has won the 2022 Little, Brown UEA Crime Fiction Award with her debut novel, The Day of the Roaring. The annual award is given to the best book by a graduating student from UEA’s Creative Writing Crime Fiction MA. Bhadreshwar wins the £3,000 prize, which was chaired by Sphere Fiction publishing director Ed Wood and judged by a diverse panel of Little, Brown staff. The runner up, Kat Latham, was highly commended for her novel, No Man’s Land. Previous winners included Femi Yayode (Lightseekers; published by Raven) and Emma Styles (No Country for Girls; Sphere).
Here's some conference good news: Not only will CrimeFest in Bristol celebrate its 15th anniversary in 2023, Specsavers has renewed its title sponsorship of the event through 2025. The convention has grown to be one of the biggest crime fiction conventions in Europe and will convene at the Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel from May 11-14, 2023, with headline authors to be announced in the New Year. The conference will also once again sponsor the CrimeFest bursary in 2023 for a crime fiction author of color, which includes attendance fees and a guaranteed panel appearance.
James Patterson has been hired to complete an unfinished Michael Crichton book. The late author’s estate provided Patterson with over 100 pages of a novel about the imminent eruption of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, which threatens a secret cache of deadly chemical weapons. Ironically, the volcano did start erupting just last month. The author’s widow, Sherri Crichton and chief executive of CrichtonSun, a company that oversees the estate, found the manuscript after his death. She said, "Michael had been working on this book for years, it was his passion project and centered in the place that inspired him the most, Hawaii." She also noted her late husband had conducted extensive research including interviews with volcanologists and location scouting. Crichton died in 2008, leaving behind a career of books including Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Congo and Sphere, many adapted for TV and film.
Mystery Readers Journal has released its Winter 2022 issue, themed around Legal Mysteries, with columns, reviews, and Author! Author! essays. You can catch a sneak peak online (and order a print or PDF copy) with two free articles, "Grief, Loss and a Con Man Changed My Life" by Steve Cavanagh and "Writing What You Know—Sort of" by Martin Edwards.
As the end-of-the-year best books list continue apace, Barry Forshaw offered up his "End-of-Year Crime Round-Up" for The Financial Times, and Michael Dirda chose "14 mystery books to savor during the long nights of winter" for The Washington Post.
Writing for MSN Online, Nick Kolakowski investigated "The Enduring Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Macabre Death," a real-life puzzle that endures.
Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Sophie Hannah, Mark Billingham, Dreda Say Mitchell, Ann Cleeves, Sara Paretsky, David Baldacci, and other crime authors revealed their favorite detectives for The Guardian, from Lew Archer to Phillip Marlowe.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Jeffrey Epstein Speaks From the Grave" by Tom Barlow.
In the Q&A roundup, Indie Crime Scene chatted with John Yearwood, whose novel, Jar of Pennies, was a featured new release in October; Crime Fiction Lover spoke with physician Cristina LePort about her debut medical thriller, Dissection; and Criminal Element had a Q&A with Peter Blauner, author of the historical suspense novel, Picture in the Sand, set in part during the filming of Cecil B. DeMille's classic The Ten Commandments in Egypt in the 1950s.
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