Prized Company

With the Labor Day holiday (which turned out to be a “working holiday” for yours truly) now over, it’s time to get back to business. The first task is to spread news, previously reported in Jiro Kimura’s The Gumshoe Site, about two crime-fiction awards.

Back in late July, the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) announced its nominees for the 2019 Dagger Awards, in nine familiar categories. Now it has released a shortlist of contenders for its inaugural CWA Dagger for Best Crime and Mystery Publisher of the Year. Those companies are as follows:

• Faber and Faber
• Harper Fiction (HarperCollins)
• HQ (HarperCollins)
• No Exit Press (Oldcastle Books)
• Orenda Books
• Pushkin Vertigo (Pushkin)
• Raven (Bloomsbury)

The winners of all the 2019 Dagger Awards are supposed to be declared during a special ceremony, in London, on October 24.

Meanwhile, Sisters in Crime Australia has let it be known which books and authors have received its 2019 Davitt Awards, named for Ellen Davitt (1812-1879), Australia’s first crime novelist. There are six categories of recipients, with 25 titles in all. I shan’t repeat them all here; instead, I’ll follow Kimura’s lead and report just the winners:

Best Adult Crime Novel:
The Ruin, by Dervla McTiernan (HarperCollins Australia)
Best Young Adult Crime Novel:
Small Spaces, by Sarah Epstein (Walker Books)
Best Children’s Crime Novel:
Wakestone Hall, by Judith Rossell (ABC Books)
Best Non-fiction Crime Book:
The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper (Penguin Random House)
Best Debut Crime Book:
Eggshell Skull, by Bri Lee (Allen & Unwin)
Readers’ Choice:
The Lost Man, by Jane Harper (Pan Macmillan Australia)

You can look over all of this year’s Davitt nominees here.