Atkinson wins the Saltire Award

The Best Scottish book of the year goes, for the first time, to an English writer — and a crime novel:

KATE Atkinson’s Case Histories yesterday became the first crime novel

and the first book by an English writer to win Scotland’s most

prestigious literary prize.

Accepting the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year award, Atkinson

said that although she was English and her heart would always remain in

Yorkshire, she had lived in Scotland for 30 years, had brought up her

children here and had the best and worst years of her life here. ATE Atkinson’s Case Histories yesterday became the first crime novel

and the first book by an English writer to win Scotland’s most

prestigious literary prize.

Yesterday, the judges said that Case Histories, in which a private

investigator solves three long-closed cases, had an inventiveness,

sense of humour and perceptiveness that lifted it far beyond the

run-of-the-mill crime novel, and was well deserving of the £5,000

award, sponsored by the Faculty of Advocates.

You’d be hard-pressed to find me arguing with their declaration. The sequel, JOLLY MURDER MYSTERY (yup, that seems to be the title) is slated for release by her UK publisher Doubleday next September.