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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
Jean Findlay
Jean Findlay was born in Edinburgh. She studied Law and French at Edinburgh University and Theatre under Tadeusz Kantor in Cracow, Poland. She co-founded an award winning theatre company and wrote and produced plays which toured to London, Berlin, Bonn, Rotterdam, Dublin, Glasgow and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. She wrote drama and book reviews for the Scotsman, and has written for the Independent, Time Out, and the Guardian. For work in... more
Lottie Taylor
Lottie Taylor studied history at St John’s College, Cambridge, specialising in European history and her pet project, the history of Esperanto. Since leaving Cambridge, she has worked in a number of fields and settled on the island of Madeira with her husband and furry children. She currently works in marketing but is collaborating with her father, military historian Prit Buttar, on studying the history of occupied cities during... more
Martin Daley
Martin was born in Carlisle. He writes both fiction and non-fiction and his works range from subjects as varied as nineteenth century detective novels to mid-twentieth century sporting history. In 2010 he created Inspector Cornelius Armstrong, who carries out his police work against a backdrop of Edwardian Carlisle. With the publication of the first Inspector Armstrong Casebook, Martin became a member of the Crime Writers’ Association. He is... more
Jill Bray
Jill lives on the Island of Guernsey now, but is originally from Yorkshire. She has a love of early medieval history which led her to study the subject at Huddersfield College in the 1980's. Working in Leeds at the time, meant that she had access to the Yorkshire Archaeological Society on their late night opening and following research, she wondered what the lives of the people she read about were actually like. This started a love of writing... more
