New Crime Fiction Award

It seems the just-completed Harrogate Crime Festival wasn’t just an unqualified success; it also was the impetus for the creation of a new award for the Best Crime Fiction book of the year:

The opening night of the 2004 Theakston’s Old Peculier Harrogate Crime Writing Festival was notable not only in its success of becoming Europe’s largest crime writing gathering, but also in its announcement of a new national literary award for 2005: the Theakston’s Old Peculier Prize for the Crime Novel of the Year, in association with Ottakar’s Bookshops.

Taking its place in the literary award calendar, the Theakston’s Old Peculier Prize will celebrate the broad spectrum of crime fiction and is the only crime fiction award voted for by readers.

With a prize of £3,000 on offer to the writer of the best crime or mystery paperback published each year, the longlist of 20 books will be chosen by the staff of Ottakar’s Bookstores and will be announced in April 2005. Crime readers nationwide will then be able to vote for their favourite book, with a shortlist announced in June 2005. From this shortlist of 6 titles, two finalists will be chosen and the final votes will be cast for the best of these two books by Festival attenders and enthusiasts at the opening event of the 2005 Festival. For the first year, the eligible books will be published in paperback in the UK between January 2004 and March 2005.

Oh, goody, the Crime Fiction equivalent of the Nibbie! Oh well, better get reading, then….