The Word Is “Champion”

UK author-screenwriter Anthony Horowitz may not have won any Olympic medals this month (due to the fact, of course, that he didn’t take part in Tokyo’s recently concluded Olympic Games), but he’s scored golden honors of his own in Japan. As The Bookseller reports,

Horowitz has won the Best Mystery of the Decade award by Honkaku Mystery Writers Club for his first Daniel Hawthorne novel, The Word Is Murder [2017], making him the most-decorated foreign crime author in Japanese history.

Horowitz is the first author in Japanese history to win 16 literary awards in total, according to his publisher. All three of Horowitz’s books are published in Japan by Tokyo Sogensha in deals brokered by Curtis Brown and have been honoured with crime awards, with Magpie Murders garnering seven, The Word Is Murder five, and The Sentence Is Death four.

The author is quoted as saying that the Best Mystery of the Decade prize “means a very great deal ... I would like to thank everyone who has supported my work in Japan, especially my publishers, Tokyo Sogensha and my (obviously) brilliant translator, Ms. Ran Yamada.”

The third of Horowitz’s Hawthorne mysteries, A Line to Kill, is due out in Great Britain on August 19 from Century. HarperCollins’ American edition should reach bookstores by October 19.