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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
Mary-Jane Riley
Mary-Jane Riley spent many years as a BBC journalist, presenting magazine programmes on BBC radio in the Eastern Counties and has covered some of the major crime stories of the past twenty years. She has carried out hundreds of interviews and her talks with Ruth Rendell and PD James encouraged her to begin writing crime fiction. Mary-Jane has combined her writing career with working for the Royal Literary Fund (RLF). As a Fellow of the charity... more
Angela Buckley
Dr Angela Buckley is a historian and author specialising in historical true crime, Victorian and Edwardian detectives, and the evolution of forensic science. With a PhD in detective history, Angela has published several books and is a regular contributor to national media, including magazines, radio, podcasts and TV. ... more
Amanda Cockrell
Amanda Cockrell is the author of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? a novel of the Hollywood blacklist; Coyote Weather, a novel of the Vietnam War era; and the young adult novel What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay. Writing as Damion Hunter, she is the author of ten Roman novels: Hadrian's Eagles, The Borderlands series, concluding with Birds of Prey; The Centurions series; The Legions of the Mist, and its sequel The Wall at the Edge... more
Charles Cordell
“Charles Cordell, a former soldier, writes with bravura confidence.” - The Times Charles Cordell – author of English Civil War fiction Charles Cordell is the author of English Civil War historical fiction series Divided Kingdom. A former soldier, with experience on the ground in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa - witnessing humanity at its best, its worst and its most desperate. His writing draws on time spent in the fraying... more
