Established authors Ann Cleeves and Peter James and newcomer Paula Hawkins were among the winners of the inaugural Dead Good Reader Awards.
The awards, given out on Friday 17th July at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, were voted on by readers and members of Penguin Random House’s crime community Dead Good Books.
The awards were presented by Mark Lawson and authors Lee Child and Val McDermid, the latter of whom also won a prize.
McDermid took The Reichenbach Falls Award for Most Epic Ending, for her book The Skeleton Road (Sphere).
Not content with feeding the appetite of crime fiction readers worldwide, Val McDermid is now helping the University of Dundee’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification in a distinctly novel way.
Working at CAHID is clearly a bit of a wheeze. So enjoyable is the work they do, helping police identify corpses found in a range of highly unusual and complicated situations, they now want others to share the fun. Thus, lay people without so much as a GSCE in biology are being invited to take part in a completely free online course. Lasting six weeks, this will use a short story McDermid has written specially for the purpose. Given instruction in various forensic techniques, students can then try to solve the crime. Later, once the identity of the victim and the cause of death have been established, McDermid will publish the story that lies behind the crime, fleshing it out, as you might say.
Reading about this I had a moment of revelation. One of the reasons I rarely read crime fiction, and certainly not the sort where scientific terms are commoner than commas, is that I am never curious enough about why someone has been killed. Probably because I know it will all be explained to me in due course, I can’t be bothered trying to work out what’s going on and why, ahead of schedule.
Nick Barley announces writers from 55 countries at festival will shake up Britain’s parochial readers and showcase Scotland as an outward-looking nation.
Scottish crime writer Val McDermid will be interviewed by Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
The UK’s parochial reading habits are an embarrassment, according to the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Nick Barley has introduced his sixth and most globally ambitious programme, which includes authors from North and South Korea, as well as first minister Nicola Sturgeon interviewing her favourite Scottish crime writer, Val McDermid.
Describing the festival, which runs from 15 to 31 August in Edinburgh’s Charlotte square, as “the most international ever attempted in Britain”, Barley accepted that many names would not be familiar to a British audience. “But what I want to get across is that these people are megastars in their own countries,” he said.
