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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
Flora Johnston
Flora Johnston is a writer from Edinburgh telling stories from Scotland and beyond. She is currently immersed in a series of novels exploring social and political change, women's lives and the impact of war in the first half of the twentieth century. The latest of these, The Berlin Passport Office, is set in Berlin in 1938 and tells the true story of spymaster Frank Foley, a remarkable man whose actions saved many lives in Berlin in the... more
Jacqueline Riding
My latest book Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's London (Profile Books) was published in February 2026. Details, endorsements and reviews here My next book Gainsborough and Reynolds: The Art of Rivalry in Georgian London will be published by Yale on 23 February 2027. I specialise in 18th and 19th century British History and Art. I am Book Reviews Editor for The Art Newspaper and a consultant for museums, galleries,... more
Theresa Shiban
Theresa Shiban was born and raised in Los Angeles, but has been a Londoner for most of her life. She has worked as a theatre director, installation artist and playwright. Her plays have been produced at the Soho, Union and Young Vic theatres and Barts Hospital. She has had attachments at the National Theatre Studio, poetry and play commissions and writing residencies at Barts Hospital and BDP architects. She is passionate about art,... 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
