Alan Parks’ GUNNER and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s BENBECULA longlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association 2026 Historical Dagger award

We’re delighted that both Alan Parks’ WW2-set trilogy opener GUNNER and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s dark novella BENBECULA have been longlisted for the Historical Dagger award at the 2026 Dagger Awards, the Crime Writers' Association’s annual celebration of the very best in crime writing.

Each novel has already garnered wide acclaim from critics and prize juries alike: this marks BENBECULA’s third longlisting, following mentions by the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Highland Book Prize; while GUNNER was among the contenders for last year’s McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year.

The shortlist for the award will be announced on 28 May, ahead of the prize-giving ceremony at the CWA gala dinner in July. Alan and Graeme were nominated alongside longlisted authors Nina Allan, Robin Blake, Kate Foster, Ariel Lawhon, Beth Lewis, Rob McInroy, Donna Moore, SW Perry, Laura Shepherd-Robinson and Sally Smith.

Alan Parks’ GUNNER made its North American debut last month, published by Pegasus Books. It garnered starred reviews from Publishers’ Weekly and Booklist and will soon be followed by Book Two in the trilogy, DECEPTION. Whisking Joseph Gunner from Blitz-torn Glasgow to the streets of 1941 New York, DECEPTION follows Gunner as he is drawn into a Secret Service conspiracy to lead the Americans into the war – no matter what the cost. Baskerville publish in the UK on 2 July, followed by Pegasus Books in North America on 1 September. Rights to GUNNER have also sold in Spain, France, Italy and the Netherlands.

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s BENBECULA is soon to be available in paperback in the UK, with Polygon publishing on 7 May. The book was named among the best of the year by both the The Times, The Telegraph and Canada’s Globe and Mail, where it was published by Biblioasis. The standalone book joins Polygon’s exceptional Darkland Tales series – where Scotland’s best writers (including Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Alan Warner and others) re-imagine true stories from the country’s past, each bringing the tales up to date with their own unique voice and identity.

Congratulations Alan and Graeme!

About GUNNER

‘Great storytelling… I loved it’ – Peter James

‘Great stuff… a vivid sense of place and time and what a main character!’ – Ian Rankin

‘In this superb historical espionage thriller, Parks excels at capturing the brutality of war… Gunner, meanwhile, is a clever, endearing hero whose personal and professional baggage have enough heft to sustain future instalments. This is a winner.’ – starred review, Publishers’ Weekly

Credit: Euan Robertson

March, 1941. Joseph Gunner is back on the streets of Glasgow after being wounded on the front lines in France.

Keeping the pain in his leg at bay with the help of morphine, Gunner, a former detective, is hoping to keep his head down as the Luftwaffe begin bombing Glasgow.

But when he runs into his old boss Drummond, he is persuaded to help examine a body found in the wreckage. When the body turns out to be that of a German, mutilated to disguise his identity, Gunner reluctantly agrees to investigate.

As Gunner begins to hunt for the truth he runs into old flames, bitter enemies, before finding himself embroiled in a high-level conspiracy that reaches far beyond his hometown of Glasgow.

Partly inspired by the true story of Rudolph Hess's secret mission to broker appeasement with Britain during WWII, GUNNER is an atmospheric and addictive new thriller from one of Britain's best-loved writers.

About BENBECULA

‘Unrelentingly disturbing and utterly gripping' – James Robertson

‘Some crime writers are successful at creating fully-formed living, breathing characters; others are more adept at playing games with the reader: to an almost unique degree, Macrae Burnet excels at both.’ – Jake Kerridge, ‘The 21 best crime and thriller novels of 2025’, The Telegraph

‘Burnet’s vivid portrayal of a troubled household by a man attempting to explain the inexplicable is dark, intense and utterly compelling.’ – Laura Wilson, ’The best recent crime and thrillers’, The Guardian

Credit: Euan Anderson

On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother and aunt. At trial in Inverness he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.

Some years later, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past.

A beguiling psychological novel set on a remote Scottish island, based on a true story and drawing on the documentary evidence of the time, Burnet constructs a gripping narrative about madness, murder and the uncertain nature of the self.

Ivan Vladislavić longlisted for top South African prize for ‘cinematic, masterful’ portrait of Johannesburg, THE NEAR NORTH

We are delighted to announce that Ivan Vladislavić – one of South Africa’s foremost writers of both literary fiction and non-fiction – has once again been longlisted for South Africa’s prestigious Sunday Times Literary Awards, with his latest work THE NEAR NORTH recognised among the nominees for this year’s non-fiction award.

The non-fiction award honours ‘the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power’ through their ‘compassion, elegance of writing, and intellectual and moral integrity’. Ivan’s book THE NEAR NORTH is a vivid account of life in Johannesburg in times of crisis. From the stony ridges of Langermann Kop in Kensington to the tree-lined avenues of Houghton, the book invites the reader to follow Ivan through the city’s streets, meeting its ghosts and journeying through time and (often circumscribed) space, finding meaning in the everyday and incidental. The book was first published by Picador Africa in March 2024; an extract from the book, ‘A Faceless Compass’ was published in the Yale Review and is available to read online.

Ivan is a previous winner of both the non-fiction and fiction awards – the only writer to have claimed both to date – having triumphed in non-fiction for his ‘ingenious love letter’ (Geoff Dyer) to Johannesburg PORTRAIT WITH KEYS (SA: Umuzi; UK: Portobello Books) in 2007, and in fiction with his ‘imaginatively wild’ (Neel Mukherjee) novel THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET (SA: Umuzi; UK: And Other Stories) in 2002.

Congratulations Ivan!

Photo: Minky Schlesinger

About Ivan Vladislavić

Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. His books include the novels THE DISTANCE, THE RESTLESS SUPERMARKET, THE EXPLODED VIEW and DOUBLE NEGATIVE, and the story collections 101 DETECTIVES and FLASHBACK HOTEL. In 2006, he published PORTRAIT WITH KEYS, a sequence of documentary texts on Johannesburg. He has edited books on architecture and art, and sometimes works with artists and photographers. TJ/DOUBLE NEGATIVE, a joint project with photographer David Goldblatt, received the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book.

His work has also won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Wits University.

Praise for THE NEAR NORTH

‘Some of the most moving prose ever written about this former mining town…What a chronicle of a city in perpetual crisis.’ – Jacob Dlamini (author of ASKARI)

‘Ivan Vladislavić’s hand, not unlike that of Marlene Dumas, is unshaking as it paints silent, slow and highly vivid, almost cinematic, lines on the canvas of our shared Johannesburg… A masterful form of reportage of life spent seeing… feeling.’ – Bongani Madondo

‘A bewitching meditation. A raw, literary, and heart-felt ode to life in Johannesburg.’ – Andrew Harding

‘An elegant, gentle, bitter-sweet ramble through the streets of Johannesburg with the incomparable Vladislavić.’ – Jonny Steinberg

‘Ivan is one of South Africa’s best writers… the book is filled with exquisitely observed observations of Johannesburg in all its different moods and the different way people experience the different streets of Johannesburg: absolutely exquisite writing.’ – John Maytham, CapeTalk

‘THE NEAR NORTH has the febrile, hallucinatory feel of JG Ballard’s earlier apocalyptic novels, but tempered and made gentle by a Proustian attention to the ordinary that manages to make the book both paean and threnody.’ – Chris Roper, Daily Maverick

‘Vladislavić's helpless addiction to the inexhaustible variety of the ordinary reality is what makes his books so extraordinary. THE NEAR NORTH is a delightful addition to a substantial output.’ – Michiel Heyns (translated from Afrikaans)

‘There is sadness, rage, confusion and humour in the author’s responses to things but they come together in a reassuring gentle wisdom, an acceptance of things as they are, even as he wishes they could be different. There has been no waning of the author’s observational powers, and no waxing of the author’s ego. It’s a beautiful book. A true thing.’ – Karin Schimke

Praise for Ivan Vladislavić

‘Ivan Vladislavić occupies a place all of his own in the South African literary landscape: a versatile stylist and formal innovator whose work is nevertheless firmly rooted in contemporary urban life.’ – J.M. Coetzee

‘Mysterious, lyrical and wickedly funny… Ivan Vladislavić is one of the most significant writers working in English today. Everyone should read him.’ – Katie Kitamura

‘In a country obsessed with social realism, Vladislavic has always tried to find less obvious ways to approach the world.’ – Damon Galgut

‘Vladislavić's narrative intelligence is nowhere more visible than in his way with language itself… We enter incidents in medias res – as though they were piano études – and exit them before we have overstayed our welcome.’ – Teju Cole

‘Nothing short of a great contemporary writer, he pushes at form and content to make something strangely new and profound.’ – Neel Mukherjee

Visit Ivan's website.

TO DIE IN JUNE by Alan Parks longlisted for 2025 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award

Edgar Award and McIlvanney Prize-winning author Alan Parks has secured his latest nomination, with recognition on the longlist of this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for TO DIE IN JUNE, the sixth novel in Alan’s acclaimed Harry McCoy series. Alan and McCoy’s last outing, MAY GOD FORGIVE, was also longlisted for the award in 2023.

The award, now in its twentieth year, celebrates excellence, originality and the very best in crime fiction from UK and Irish authors. The shortlist will be unveiled on 5 June, with the overall winner to be announced at Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, which takes place from 17 – 20 July 2025. Previous winners include Mick Herron, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Chris Whitaker and Belinda Bauer.

TO DIE IN JUNE was published by Canongate in the UK in June 2023 and in the US by Europa in June 2024. The series is published in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Sweden, and the Film/TV rights are also under option.

Alan’s latest book GUNNER, the first in a new trilogy of World War II-set thrillers, is soon to be published by Baskerville Press, on 17 July 2025 and is already receiving praise from readers.

Congratulations Alan!

About TO DIE IN JUNE

A woman enters a Glasgow police station to report her son missing, but no record can be found of the boy. When Detective Harry McCoy, seconded from the cop shop across town, discovers the family is part of the cultish Church of Christ's Suffering, he suspects there is more to Michael's disappearance than meets the eye.

Meanwhile there are reports of a string of poisonings of down-and-outs across the city. The dead are men who few barely notice, let alone care about — but, as McCoy is painfully aware, among this desperate community is his own father.

Even as McCoy searches for the missing boy, he must conceal from his colleagues the real reason for his presence — to investigate corruption in the station. Some folk pray for justice. Detective Harry McCoy hasn't got time to wait.

Credit: Euan Robertson

About Alan Parks

Alan Parks worked in the music industry for over twenty years before turning to crime writing.

His debut BLOODY JANUARY was shortlisted for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, FEBRUARY’S SON was nominated for an Edgar Award, BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, the Prix Mystère de la Critique in the foreign fiction category, and was shortlisted for the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel and THE APRIL DEAD was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year. The fifth Harry McCoy book, MAY GOD FORGIVE, was published in April 2022 and won the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2022. It was shortlisted for the 2023 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and longlisted for the 2023 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Most recently, TO DIE IN JUNE, the sixth entry in the series, was published by Canongate in 2023. The Harry McCoy series is optioned for television.

Alan was born in Scotland and attended The University of Glasgow where he was awarded a M.A. in Moral Philosophy. He still lives and works in the city as well as spending time in London.

Praise for Alan Parks

‘One of the great Scottish crime writers’ – The Times

‘Tipped to become an enduring classic of tartan noir.’ – Sunday Post

‘Dark and gritty… Gripping.’ – Crime Monthly

‘A brilliant series’ – Sunday Times Crime Club

‘Bloody and brilliant’ – Louise Welsh (on BLOODY JANUARY)

‘Pitch-black Tartan noir: bleak, but with an emotional heart that's hard to ignore.’ – Daily Mail (on FEBRUARY’S SON)

‘Manoeuvering through the mean streets of Glasgow, the morally ambiguous, deeply flawed McCoy makes an ideal antihero.’ – Publishers Weekly (on BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER, Edgar Prize Winner 2022)

‘Altogether one of the best police thrillers of the last few years.’ – Morning Star (on THE APRIL DEAD)

Visit Alan’s website

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Romalyn Ante’s AGIMAT longlisted for the inaugural Jhalak Poetry Prize

Author photo: S Chadawong

Congratulations to Romalyn Ante, whose second poetry collection AGIMAT (Chatto & Windus) has been longlisted for this year’s Jhalak Prize, celebrating the best book published in the UK and Ireland by a writer of colour. Previously shortlisted in 2021 for her debut collection ANTIEMETIC FOR HOMESICKNESS, Romalyn is this year recognised in the new category exclusively for poetry collections.

Other authors nominated for the longlist alongside Romalyn were Khairani Barokka, Azad Ashim Sharma, Mimi Khalvati, Claudine Toutoungi, Nisha Ramayya, Rushika Wick, Amaan Hyder, Raymond Antrobus, Tim Tim Cheng, Karen McCarthy Woolf and the late Gboyega Odubanjo. The poetry prize will be judged by Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker and Will Harris, with the shortlist due to be announced on 22 April, followed by the winners on 4 June.

‘This longlist demands to be looked at,’ said the judges of the poetry prize in a press release. ‘These are twelve poetry books by writers of colour published at a time when fewer than 1% of students at GCSE level study a book by a writer of colour. These are books saying valuable things in unusual forms. Like all good poetry, each book is uniquely receptive to the speech of our time, finding out the spaces in language where ideology inserts itself and picking it apart.’

‘It is clear in the ninth year of the Jhalak Prize awards that the quality of work being produced by writers of colour in Britain and Ireland is extraordinary,’ said Prize founder Sunny Singh. ‘The judges for all three awards, including our inaugural Jhalak Poetry Prize, have struggled to select only twelve books for each longlist and have chosen them with immense care, difficulty and heartbreak for all the books that they could not include. These books do not flinch from the harsh realities of our histories, times and lives. Yet they are also books full of love, hope and joy.’

About AGIMAT:

this charms the buried light of stars –

this deflects bullets – this unblooms a war –

In some Filipino clans, parents pass down to each child an AGIMAT, an amulet, in the hope its magic will protect and empower them. In a world of daily pain and loss, Romalyn Ante’s second collection asks: how do we keep safe what we hold most dear?

At the dawn of the pandemic, the poet – a practising nurse in the NHS – is thrown onto the frontlines of the war against COVID-19. Past conflicts swim into the now. When she falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage, it forces a reckoning with her family’s suffering under Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of the Philippines. Elsewhere, we meet the irrepressible goddess Mebuyan, who, in Philippine myth, nurses the spirits of children in the underworld. Here, she watches over young people in crisis – a girl who can’t stop cutting herself, a teenager who has leapt from a railway viaduct.

These are poems of strength and solace; they question what it means to fight, and what it takes to heal.

Romalyn is currently writing her debut novel, THE LEFT-BEHIND CHILD, a lyrical and vivid depiction of childhood and rupture inspired by her and her mother’s stories of leaving the Philippines to work and care for others in the United Kingdom, which will be published by Chatto & Windus in Spring 2026.

About Romalyn Ante

Romalyn Ante FRSL is a British-Filipino poet, essayist, and editor. She grew up in the Philippines and migrated to her second home, Wolverhampton, in 2005.

She is co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language, and the founder of Tsaá with Roma, an online interview series with poets and other creatives. She was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship and she currently sits as an editorial board member for Poetry London magazine. 

She is the first East-Asian to win the Poetry London Prize (2018) and the Manchester Poetry Prize (2017). She also won the Creative Future Literary Award 2017.

Apart from being a writer, she also works as a specialist nurse practitioner. Her debut poetry collection, ANTIEMETIC FOR HOMESICKNESS, is published by Chatto & Windus and was an Irish Times Best Poetry Book of 2020, an Observer Poetry Book of the Month and a Poetry School Poetry Book of the Year 2020. It was also a National Poetry Day UK Recommended Read and was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

 Praise for AGIMAT

‘In her spellbinding meditation on love and loss, hope is less “the thing with feathers” and more the thing with forceps… I felt grateful for the tender attention the poet affords to a hope that many of us hold dear: that as patients – that as people – we may amount to more than just flesh and bone. Thankfully, in the hands of Romalyn Ante the human self far exceeds statistics and the subtotal of all its scars.’ – Jade Cuttle, The Observer

‘Unflinching in detailing the physical and emotional exhaustion of [nursing], and also delivers deft political commentary… As she moves between the Philippines and the Midlands, and touches on her relationships with her family and partner, what unites the poems is her simple, beautiful language, and an awareness of the difficulty of healing.’ – Rishi Dastidar, ‘The Best Recent Poetry’, The Guardian

‘Ante is an alchemical wonder of a poet: unparalleled in her image-making, raw to both historical and contemporary damage and rich in cultures… Keep these poems with you as I will – always.’ – Fiona Benson

‘Romalyn Ante’s mesmeric new collection is deeply rooted in the dualities of life, cultural identity, and the profound interplay of personal and communal experience. Vivid, lyrical, and always surprising, it is a testament to those who navigate the complex legacies of history toward healing and resilience.’ – Nathan Filer

‘With precision, deftness, and at times playfulness, AGIMAT weaves in mythical and modern imageries, the universal with the intimate. The result is a powerful and hopeful collection, filled with heart and beauty, that illuminates us to the many forms that caring and healing can take.’ – Cecile Pin

Praise for Romalyn Ante

‘Captivating, playful, moving, witty and agile... an unforced poet with a lightness of touch and fortitude’ – The Guardian

‘Romalyn Ante is a poet to fall in love with’ – Liz Berry

‘Ante's poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core’ – Times Literary Supplement

Vist Romalyn’s website.

Follow Romalyn on X (previously Twitter) and Instagram. 

THE TUMBLING GIRL by Bridget Walsh on 2024 HWA Debut Crown Award longlist

THE TUMBLING GIRL, the first title in Bridget Walsh’s vivid Variety Palace Mystery series, has been longlisted for the 2024 HWA Debut Crown Award.

The HWA Awards celebrate the best historical writing, fiction and non-fiction and its ability to engage, illuminate, entertain and inform legions of readers. To be considered, the bulk of the narrative of the work submitted must take place at least thirty-five years prior to publication. There are three awards – the HWA Gold Crown (for writers already published), the HWA Non-fiction Crown and the HWA Debut Crown. Previous winners of the HWA Debut Crown Award include THE SECRET DIARIES OF CHARLES IGNATIUS SANCHO by Paterson Joseph and THE SPIRIT ENGINEER by AJ West.

The other titles on this year’s Debut Crown Award longlist are as follows: THE OTHER SIDE OF MRS WOOD by Lucy Barker; THE GOLDEN GATE by Amy Chua; LEEWARD by Katie Daysh; COLOURS OF SIENA by Judith May Evans; THE MAIDEN by Kate Foster; THE PAINTER’S DAUGHTER by Emily Howes; ALL US SINNERS by Katy Massey; OUR HIDEOUS PROGENY by C. E. McGill; THE WITCHING TIDE by Margaret Meyer; THE BEHOLDERS by Hester Musson and THE REVELS by Stacey Thomas.

THE TUMBLING GIRL sees an unlikely duo – ex-actress Minnie Ward and private detective Albert Easterbrook – team up to solve a grisly spate of murders in Victorian London. It was first published by Gallic Books in May 2023, and prior to publication it won the UEA Little, Brown Award for Crime Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2024 Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and reached No. 1 in the US Amazon Kindle New Historical Thriller Chart.

THE INNOCENTS, the sequel to THE TUMBLING GIRL, was published by Gallic Books earlier this year to great acclaim (with The Financial Times describing it as ‘historical crime fiction at its most beguiling’) and Bridget is currently working on the next in the series, THE SPIRIT GUIDE. The latter sees Minnie and Albert uncovering the dark secrets behind a female-only spiritualist group that purports to help its members commune with deceased loved ones.

About Bridget Walsh

Bridget Walsh lives in Norwich. She has a PhD in ‘Murder in the Victorian Domestic Sphere’ and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.

 Praise for THE TUMBLING GIRL

‘Bridget Walsh’s THE TUMBLING GIRL is the first in what promises to be an entertaining series of historical mysteries… a narrative that neatly weds historical detail and quiet wit.’ – Nick Rennison, The Sunday Times, ‘The best historical fiction books of May 2023’

‘Ms. Walsh does a splendid job depicting Minnie’s flea-bitten yet appealing theatrical world and Albert’s monied yet treacherous milieu.’ – Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

‘Walsh impresses in this series launch featuring an unlikely pair of investigators in 1876 London… diligent research pays off in spades here, and her rich and nuanced portrayal of the period will leave readers feeling like they’re on the soggy streets of London. Imogen Robertson readers will be eager for a sequel to this un-put-downable mystery.’ – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review and a ‘Books of the Week’ pick

‘Walsh resurrects the culture and crimes of Victoriana without cliché or condescension, but with warmth, wit, remarkable texture and rare authority.’ – Tom Benn

‘A brilliantly written page-turner. A bravura performance tumbling us into a compelling mystery in a vivid, richly imagined world. You can smell the greasepaint and hear the roar of the crowd on every page.’ – Imogen Robertson

Visit Bridget’s website

 Follow Bridget on X (previously Twitter) and Instagram