The Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award is one of the UK's top crime-fiction awards, sponsored by Theakston's Old Peculier. [1] It is awarded annually at Harrogate Crime Writing Festival in the UK, held every July, as part of the Harrogate International Festivals. [2] The winner receives £3000 and a small hand-carved oak beer cask carved by one of Britain's last coopers. [3] Novels eligible are those crime novels published in paperback any time during the previous year. [4] Voting is by the public with decisions of a jury-panel also taken into account, [5] a fact not-much publicised by the award organisers, who are keen to emphasize the public-voting aspect of the award.
John Harvey is a British author of crime fiction most famous for his series of jazz-influenced Charlie Resnick novels, based in the City of Nottingham.
The Orwell Prize, based at University College London, is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" ; between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
Peter May is a Scottish television screenwriter, novelist, and crime writer. He is the recipient of writing awards in Europe and America. The Blackhouse won the U.S. Barry Award for Crime Novel of the Year and the national literature award in France, the CEZAM Prix Litteraire. The Lewis Man won the French daily newspaper Le Télégramme's 10,000-euro Grand Prix des Lecteurs. In 2014, Entry Island won both the Deanston's Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the UK's ITV Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year Award. May's books have sold more than two million copies in the UK and several million internationally.
Stuart MacBride is a Scottish writer, most famous for his crime thrillers set in the "Granite City" of Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae.
Peter J. James is a British writer of crime fiction. He was born in Brighton, the son of Cornelia James, the former glovemaker to Queen Elizabeth II.
Adrian McKinty is a Northern Irish writer of crime and mystery novels and young adult fiction, best known for his 2020 award-winning thriller, The Chain, and the Sean Duffy novels set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. He is a winner of the Edgar Award, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, the Macavity Award, the Ned Kelly Award, the Barry Award, the Audie Award, the Anthony Award and the International Thriller Writers Award. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
Neil Cross is a British novelist and scriptwriter, best known as the creator of the drama series Luther and Hard Sun. He is also the showrunner for the TV adaptation of The Mosquito Coast, which began airing in 2021.
The Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction is a British literary award founded in 2010. At £25,000, it is one of the largest literary awards in the UK. The award was created by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, who is generally considered the originator of historical fiction with the novel Waverley in 1814.
Belinda Bauer is a British writer of crime novels. She grew up in England and South Africa, but later moved to Wales, where she worked as a court reporter in Cardiff; the country is often used as a setting in her work.
The Desmond Elliott Prize is an annual award for the best debut novel written in English and published in the UK. The winning novel can be from any genre of fiction and must exhibit depth and breadth with a compelling narrative. The winner receives £10,000. The prize is named in honour of the distinguished late publisher and literary agent, Desmond Elliott.
Mick Herron is a British mystery and thriller novelist, winner of the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger award for Dead Lions.
Antonia Hodgson is a British historical crime writer and publisher.
Harrogate International Festivals (HIF) is a registered charity and one of the UK's longest running arts festivals, having been established in 1966. Based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.
Graeme Macrae Burnet is a Scottish writer, whose novels have won and been nominated for several awards. He has also written occasionally for The Guardian, The Observer and Le Monde. His first novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, earned him the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2013, and his second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. His third novel, The Accident on the A35, is a sequel to The Disappearance ofAdèle Bedeau. In 2017, he won the Author of the Year category in the Sunday Herald Culture Awards. One review in The Guardian described Burnet's novels as an experiment with a genre that might be called "false true crime". In July 2022, Burnet's novel Case Study (2021) was named on the longlist of the Booker Prize.
Liz Nugent is an Irish novelist, born in Dublin in 1967. She is the author of four crime fiction novels. She is no relation of Spider Nugent off Coronation Street.
David John Young is an English novelist whose crime thriller series featuring a fictional Volkspolizei detective, Karin Müller, is set in 1970s East Germany. Young's debut novel Stasi Child won the 2016 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger for the best historical crime novel of the year. Both it and the follow-up, Stasi Wolf, were longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2016 and 2017 respectively. In 2017, Bonnier Zaffre, the UK adult fiction division of the Bonnier Group, announced Young had signed a six-figure deal for three further novels in the series, making five in all, with the third, A Darker State, being published in February 2018. Young says the inspiration for the series came after his indie pop band The Candy Twins toured Germany in 2007 and he read Anna Funder's non-fiction book Stasiland between gigs. He secured the tour thanks to favourable comments made by Edwyn Collins about a tribute song Young wrote about him. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Young was a news producer and editor for more than 25 years with BBC World Service radio and BBC World TV.
The Chain is a 2019 novel written by Adrian McKinty.
The Costa Book Award for Biography, formerly part of the Whitbread Book Awards (1971-2006), was an annual literary award for children's books, part of the Costa Book Awards. The award concluded in 2022.
Susan Elizabeth Steiner was an English novelist and journalist best known for her three crime thriller novels set in Cambridgeshire, and whose central character is DS Manon Bradshaw. The first novel in the series was Missing, Presumed and was published in 2016. This was followed by Persons Unknown, published in 2017, and Remain Silent, published in 2020.
Abir Mukherjee is a Scottish-Bengali author best known his Wyndham and Banerjee series of crime novels set in Raj-era India.