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news and features
HWA Crown Award Winners 2025
The winners are:Gold: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Canongate Books)Non-fiction: Moederland by Cato Pedder (John Murray)Debut: A Poisoner’s Tale by Cathryn Kemp (Bantam) Read more about the books and the shortlisted titles on... more
Dorothy Dunnett / HWA Short Story Competition 2025
The winning and shortlisted stories! Huge congratulations to our winner, Sean Lusk, our Highly Commended writers, Alex Edwards and Joseph Dragovich, and the writers of our shortlisted stories, Liz Kershaw, Sopie Lenoir, and Elaine... more
Dorothy Dunnett Society / HWA Short Story Competition Longlist
Many congratulations to the writers of our longlisted stories. The shortlist and winning stories will be announced on Friday 3 October! We ended up with nearly 150 stories this year and the standard was extremely high. Many thanks to our first... moreauthor showcase
Glenda Young
Glenda lives in the northeast where her saga novels are set. Her trilogy of sagas begins with The Toffee Factory Girls. The books are inspired by Horner's Toffee Factory and Dainty Dinah toffee of Chester-le-Street, County Durham. Her Ryhope sagas are set in the mining village where she grew up in the northeast. These are standalone books and can be ready in any order. Her novel THE PAPER MILL GIRL received a commendation from the British... more
Vanessa de Haan
Vanessa de Haan is a writer, journalist, editor and proofreader. In 2005 she left The Spectator in London and moved to Devon. She took the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and was a columnist on the Western Morning News. Her first novel – THE RESTLESS SEA (HarperCollins, 2018) – is about the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy during the Arctic convoys of the second world war, and was inspired by family history, as... more
Mark Grenside
Mark Grenside is a thriller writer known for twist-driven novels set in the high-stakes world of film and television. His debut, Fall Out (2021), introduces film producer Marcus Riley and Mako de Turris in a series that blends insider industry knowledge with fast-paced suspense. Before turning to fiction, Mark built an international career spanning finance, media, and entertainment. He began as a Lloyd’s of London insurance broker... more
Maggie Brookes
Maggie Brookes is an ex-journalist and BBC TV producer turned novelist and poet. She relishes uncovering stories about the strength of women and the power of friendship and love in the most terrible of circumstances. Her novel The Prisoner's Wife, based on an extraordinary true story of WW2, was published by Penguin Random House and around the world in 2020. It tells the story of a young Czech woman who disguised herself as a British... more
