Translated Titles Touted

Organizers of the annual Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year today announced their longlist of nominees for the 2022 prize. Those books and authors are:

• Fatal Isles, by Maria Adolfsson, translated by Agnes Broomé (Sweden, Zaffre)
• The Assistant, by Kjell Ola Dahl, translated by Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda Books)
• The Butterfly House, by Katrine Engberg, translated by Tara Chace (Denmark, Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Therapist, by Helene Flood, translated by Alison McCullough (Norway, MacLehose Press)
• The Commandments, by Óskar Guðmundsson, translated by Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus)
• Smoke Screen, by Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger, translated by Megan Turney (Norway, Orenda)
• Everything Is Mine, by Ruth Lillegraven, translated by Diane Oatley (Norway, AmazonCrossing)
• Silenced, by Sólveig Pálsdóttir, translated by Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus)
• Knock Knock, by Anders Roslund, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Sweden, Harvill Secker)
• Cold as Hell, by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, translated by Quentin Bates (Iceland, Orenda)
• Geiger, by Gustaf Skördeman, translated by Ian Giles (Sweden, Zaffre)
• The Rabbit Factor, by Antti Tuomainen, translated by David Hackston (Finland, Orenda)

From these dozen titles (all released in Great Britain in 2021), a shortlist will be developed and released on November 16.

The Petrona Award memorializes Maxine Clarke, the British editor, crime-fiction blogger, and “champion of Scandinavian crime fiction” who passed away in December 2012 (Petrona was the name of her long-running blog). Previous winners include Mikael Niemi’s To Cook a Bear, Antti Tuomainen’s Little Siberia, and Jørn Lier Horst’s The Katharina Code. To learn more about this prize and its history, refer to the Petrona Award Web site.

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Meanwhile, In Reference to Murder carries the news this morning that “When Women Kill, by Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán (translated by Sophie Hughes), has won the 2022 British Academy Book Prize.” Blogger B.V. Lawson goes on to explain: “Novelist Zerán has long been fascinated not only with the root causes of violence against women, but by those women who have violently rejected the domestic and passive roles they were meant by their culture to inhabit. Choosing as her subject four iconic homicides perpetrated by Chilean women in the twentieth century—intertwining true crime, critical essays, and research diaries—she spent years researching this complex work of narrative nonfiction detailing not only the troubling tales of the murders themselves, but the story of how society, the media, and men in power reacted to these killings, painting their perpetrators as witches, hysterics, or femmes fatales.”