Allen & Unwin’s award prizes local crime highly
Sydney-based publisher Allen & Unwin has decided to launch a lucrative award for crime writers.
Whoever coined the expression “crime doesn’t pay” did not consult publishers. That crime pays, in terms of books sales, is elementary, as Sherlock Holmes would put it.
Australia lost the “godfather” of crime fiction two years ago this month when Peter Corris, creator of private detective Cliff Hardy, died aged 76. Four months earlier, Peter Temple, the first crime writer to win a Miles Franklin award, for Truth in 2010, died aged 71.
Corris’s publisher, the Sydney-based Allen & Unwin, has decided to launch a lucrative award for crime writers.
The Allen & Unwin Crime Fiction Prize will consider unpublished manuscripts between 70,000-100,000 words in the crime or thriller genres. It will be open to established writers and first-timers alike resident in Australia or New Zealand.
The winner will receive a publishing contract and a $25,000 advance against royalties. Entries open on August 31 and close on February 26, 2021. The winning novel will be announced in September 2021 and published the following year.
A&U publisher Jane Palfreyman said “the appetite of readers for quality crime fiction has never been so high, and Australian crime writing is flourishing here and around the world’’.
“We are keen to expand our crime list by discovering strong voices and new talent,” she said.
The A&U announcement comes ahead of a burst of crime fiction to be published between now and Christmas and the BAD Sydney International Crime Writers Festival in September, which will feature digital interviews with crime writers.
UK-born Melbourne author Jane Harper, who has risen to the top of the crime writing lists with her novels The Dry, Force of Nature and The Lost Man, will publish her fifth novel, The Survivors, in September.
Former SBS TV and print journalist Chris Hammer, based in Canberra, jumped on to the best-seller lists with his first two crime novels, Scrublands and Silver, featuring journalist Martin Scarsden. The renegade reporter returns in the third instalment of this series, Trust, due in October.
Dozens of other local crime novels are out now or due soon from veterans such as Michael Robotham (When She Was Good) and Alan Carter (Doom Creek) and newcomers, including Gabriel Bermogser, who sold his debut novel The Hunted as a film deal, Megan Goldin (The Night Swim) and Rose Carlyle (The Girl in the Mirror).
Internationally, best-selling Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo will publish his next novel, The Kingdom, in September. Nesbo will be one of the authors interviewed at the BAD international festival from September 10-13.
Other writers signed up include Don Winslow, Karin Slaughter and Kathy Reichs, all from the US, Ann Cleeves, the English creator of the Shetland Island series, Swedish best-seller Camilla Lackberg and English husband and wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who write as Nicci French.
Winslow will be interviewed by this reporter while Slaughter will be interviewed by local crime writer Caroline Overington, also a senior journalist at The Australian.
For more information: www.allenandunwin.com
BAD festival program: www.badsydney.com
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