Val McDermid Receives 2010 Cartier Diamond Dagger

This year’s recipient of the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger Award, which honors outstanding achievement in the field of crime writing, is Val McDermid. Margaret Murphy, chair of the CWA, said in the accompanying release: “The CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger award acknowledges the work of an author who has made an outstanding contribution to the genre. Val McDermid is a worthy winner whose work has entertained and thrilled millions of readers as well as many more who have enjoyed the TV adaptations her books have inspired.”

The Guardian caught up with McDermid when the news broke earlier this morning. “I’m thrilled and proud but also a bit gobsmacked,“McDermid told the paper’s Michelle Pauli. “The

Diamond Dagger is the jewel in the crown for any crime writer, and this

makes me a member of a pretty stellar club. But I still think of myself

as a young Turk, and it’s hard not to see this honour as placing me

firmly in the Establishment. I guess I’ll just have to regard it as

something to defy as well as to embrace!”

It caps off a year in which McDermid was inducted into the crime-writers’ Hall of Fame and elected to an honorary fellowship at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She’ll receive her latest prize at a ceremony whose venue, date and time is still being determined.