We are delighted to announce that Harry Whitehead’s WHITE ROAD has advanced to the shortlist of the prestigious Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, awarded by The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation, following its longlisting last month. The award celebrates the very best in paperback books, across a number of genres, ‘where adventure can be found’, in the spirit of the award’s co-founder, the late international-bestselling author Wilbur Smith.

The shortlist was selected by a panel of 35 dedicated librarians and library staff from across the UK, who described WHITE ROAD as ‘adventure in every sense, with thrilling obstacles, both man-made and natural, for the protagonist to overcome’. You can read an interview with Harry, discussing WHITE ROAD, his research, and the thrill of adventure writing on the Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation website.

Shortlisted alongside Harry and WHITE ROAD are:

THE TAROT READER OF VERSAILLES by Anya Bergman (Manilla Press)
BOUDICCA’S DAUGHTER by Elodie Harper (Head of Zeus)
ESPERANCE by Adam Oyebanji (Arcadia)
THE FERTILE EARTH by Ruthvika Rao (Oneworld)
POOR GIRLS by Clare Whitfield (Head of Zeus)

The winner will be decided by a panel of judges, including Alex Bescoby, Costanza Casati, Joshua Adeyemi, Preet Chandi and Tamsin Collison, as well as a public vote, which will open on Wednesday, 1 July. The Foundation will be running online and in-person events with the nominees throughout the summer, providing readers with an opportunity to get a hold of the books and pick their favourites, before the winner is announced at a reception at Foyles’ flagship Charing Cross Road bookshop on 17 September, with the victor taking home the trophy and a £10,000 prize. Previous winners include Costanza Casati, Francesca de Torres, Emma Styles, Abir Mukherjee and Stef Penney.

WHITE ROAD – the thrilling, unforgettable story of two survivors of a devastating oil rig explosion in the High Arctic, and the mystery behind the catastrophe – was published in September 2025 by indie publisher Claret Press, and audiobook publisher WF Howes, gaining plaudits from Liz Jensen, Mark Cocker and Eve Smith, who named the book one of her favourite reads of 2025 in the Daily Express.

Congratulations Harry!

About WHITE ROAD

‘An intelligent, urgent, white-knuckle ride… a novel that will get you thinking, keep you guessing – and leave you reeling.’ – Liz Jensen

‘A compelling eco-thriller with big themes and an unforgiving icescape that’s a character in itself.’ – Eve Smith

‘A spellbinding adventure story, told with anger, wit and a sense of beauty.’ – Mat Coward, Morning Star

Only one knows the truth. Only one can reveal it. Only one can save them all…

Carrie, a Scottish rescue swimmer out of her depth in the High Arctic. Ross, the owner of an oil rig with a guilty conscience. Amaruq, an Inuvialuit oil-rig worker caught between two worlds.

Stranded on the Arctic ice with a starving polar bear and a half-dead stranger, Carrie’s left with nothing but deadly choices. Ross and Amaruq face their own crossroads. Lives hang on their decisions.

From the cruel Arctic to the corporate backrooms of shady Big Oil, WHITE ROAD is an authentic and gripping eco-thriller of survival, battled out at the edge of everything.

About Harry Whitehead

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, where he directs the annual free literature festival, Literary Leicester. He has been a Wingate Scholar and an Eccles Centre Fellow in North American Studies at the British Library. Before academia, he lived for several years in the Far East before returning to the UK to work in the film business as an assistant director, location manager and, latterly, a story consultant.

His debut novel, THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT (Penguin Canada) is a work of literary historical fiction set among the First Peoples of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. The product of some fifteen years of historical and ethnographic research, it was reviewed as ‘powerful, brave, ambitious’ (The Globe and Mail), ‘a thriller with a Joseph Conradian plot’ (The Walrus), ‘a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive’ (Quill and Quire).

His second novel, WHITE ROAD, a literary thriller set in the High Arctic, was published in September 2025 by Claret Press and WF Howes.

Visit Harry’s website

Follow Harry on Instagram

Tony Park’s THE CULL is already thrilling readers in Australia and South Africa, where Pan Macmillan publish, and Pan Macmillan UK will publish the ebook for British readers tomorrow, 19 October 2017, with a print edition following on 22 March 2018. As Publisher’s Weekly says ‘Park excels at capturing the wilds of the continent, as well as its political and commercial pressures’ and THE CULL encapsulates all this in another pacy thriller that taps into urgent contemporary issues – this time the deadly battle against the poaching of endangered wildlife.

Crime Review has described Tony Park’s writing as ‘riveting’, saying that ‘Park is now required reading’ and the Australian Daily Telegraph (Australia) recently gave THE CULL a Starred Review, describing it as ‘a fascinating insight into a life-and-death struggle — for humans as well as animals.’ Tony also appeared on South African news channel SABC2 this week to talk about the book, its issues, and the inspirational people tackling real-life poaching in Africa.

In THE CULL by Tony Park, former mercenary Sonja Kurtz returns, hired by business tycoon Julianne Clyde-Smith to head an elite squad whose aim is to take down Africa's top poaching kingpins.But as the body count rises, it becomes harder for Sonja to stay under the radar as she is targeted by an underworld syndicate known as The Scorpions. When her love interest, safari guide and private investigator Hudson Brand, is employed to look into the death of an alleged poacher at the hands of Sonja's team, she is forced to ask herself if Julianne's crusade has gone too far.

From South Africa's Kruger National Park to the Serengeti of Tanzania, Sonja realises she is fighting a war on numerous fronts, against enemies known and unknown.

Tony Park grew up in Australia and fell in love with South Africa on a short trip in 1995: he and his wife now divide their time between two homes, one in Sydney and another in South Africa on the border of the Kruger National Park. Author of 14 bestselling thrillers and several non-fiction titles, he has worked as a newspaper reporter in Australia and England, a government press secretary, a public relations consultant, and a freelance writer. He is also a major in the Australian Army Reserve and served six months in Afghanistan in 2002. His work has been sold in translation in seven countries. His fifteenth novel CAPTIVE will be published in 2018.

You can find out more about Tony Park on his website and his Facebook page and you can follow him on Twitter (especially if you want to see some marvellous images of African wildlife) on @tonyparkauthor.

PRAISE FOR THE CULL:

‘A stunning and realistic testament to the locale in which it is set… a nail-biting, on-the edge-of-your-seat thrill ride which fans new and established will no doubt be pleased with. An awe-inspiring read.’ – Mrs. B’s Book Reviews

‘THE CULL provides a fascinating insight into a life-and-death struggle — for humans as well as animals.’ — Bruce McDougall, Daily Telegraph (Australia)

MORE PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:

'Tony Park is one of Australia's best thriller writers and his African-based novels are consistently entertaining and thought-provoking.' -- Canberra Times

'Park's heroes are tough, blokey types – soldiers and coppers - and his heroines sassy and smart, but Africa always steals the show…a great way to spend a winter evening, transported to somewhere warm and exotic.' -- Georgia Gowing, The Independent Weekly

'He just gets better and better. His descriptions of the southern African bush and mountain jungles are so vivid you can just about feel the sun on your skin and smell the dust and animals.' -- Frank Walker, Sun Herald

'If you like action adventures, with a spy theme, some education – either travel or technological - and a little romance, then this guy's for real… What puts this into the top echelon of the genre is that the people, even the heroes, are fallible human beings.' -- June Joyce, Waikato Times