Best Showings in Blighty

I’m a bit tardy in reporting this, but I only just happened upon the news (in The Bookseller) that “Northumberland-based author Jacqueline Auld has won the [2022] Lindisfarne Prize for Crime Fiction, an award which celebrates the outstanding crime and thriller storytelling of those who are from, or whose work celebrates, north-east England.” The Lindisfarne is given annually to a work that has not yet been published in any form.

The Bookseller goes on to explain that “Auld’s submission, The Children of Gaia, was selected by the prize’s panel of judges, featuring crime writer Nicky Black, founder of Newcastle Noir festival Dr. Jacky Collins, last year’s winner of the prize Robert Scragg, and [the prize’s founder, author L.J.] Ross,” whose publishing imprint, Dark Skies Publishing, sponsors this honor together with the Newcastle Noir Crime Writing Festival and Newcastle Libraries. Auld is slated to be given £2,500 in prize money “to support the completion of her work, and funding towards a year’s membership of the Society of Authors and the Alliance of Independent Authors.”

As I noted in August, there were four rivals for this commendation: Clare Sewell’s Can't Hide, Duncan Robb’s Sharp Focus, Katherine Graham’s Salted Earth, and Ramona Slusarczyk’s The Taste of Iron.

Learn more about Auld and the Lindisfarne Prize here.

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Meanwhile, today’s e-mail brings the announcement, from London’s Goldsboro Books, that TV journalist and author Elodie Harper has won the 2022 Glass Bell Award for The Wolf Den, “the first novel in a new trilogy re-imagining the lives of the forgotten women of Pompeii’s brothels, published by Head of Zeus.” As this year’s victor, Harper has received £2,000 and “a beautiful, handmade glass bell.”

There were five other contenders for the Glass Bell this year: We Are All Birds of Uganda, by Hafsa Zayyan (Merky); Sistersong, by Lucy Holland (Macmillan); Ariadne, by Jennifer Saint (Wildfire); Mrs. March, by Virginia Feito (Fourth Estate); and Daughters of Night, by Laura Shepherd Robinson (Mantle). Of those, only Daughters of the Night (one of my favorite books of 2021) can be deemed a crime/mystery novel. But the Glass Bell covers broader ground. As press materials explain, it is “awarded annually to a compelling novel, of any genre—from romance and thrillers, to historical, speculative and literary fiction—with brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realized.”

The Glass Bell Award was created in 2017 by Goldsboro Books co-founder David Headley. Last year’s winner was Clare Whitfield’s People of Abandoned Character (Head of Zeus), which provided an unusual perspective on the 19th-century’s Jack the Ripper slayings.