Celebrating its 60th year, the British Crime Writers’ Association has announced the first batch of its coveted Daggers Awards. The Gala Awards Dinner was held on Monday 15 July at Kings Place in London and was hosted by television personality and former Tory MP, Gyles Brandreth. The highlights of the Awards (so far announced) are:
- Andrew Taylor has won his third CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger for his novel The Scent of Death. No one else has won the award three times.
- The CWA International Dagger has been shared by two French authors, Fred Vargas (for Ghost Riders of Ordebec) and Pierre Lemaitre (for Alex). Fred Vargas has previously won the Award in 2006, 2007 and 2009.
- The CWA Diamond Dagger 2013 was presented to Lee Child, from last year’s winner, Frederick Forsyth.
- Finn Clarke was awarded the CWA Debut Dagger for the unpublished novel, Call Time.
- The 2013 CWA Non-Fiction Dagger was presented to Paul French for Midnight in Peking, which told the story of the murder of a former UK consul in Peking in 1938.
- Stella Duffy won the CWA Short Story Dagger for her story Come Away with Me, which first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime Volume 10, edited by Maxim Jakubowski.
- The longlists were announced for the CWA Gold, Steel and John Creasey Daggers. They were:
CWA Gold Dagger Longlist
- Belinda Bauer for Rubbernecker (Bantam/Transworld)
- Lauren Beukes for The Shining Girls (HarperCollins)
- Sam Hawken for Tequila Sunset (Serpent’s Tail)
- Mick Herron for Dead Lions (Soho Crime)
- Becky Masterman for Rage Against the Dying (Orion)
- Sara Paretsky for Breakdown (Hodder & Stoughton)
- Michael Robotham for Say You’re Sorry (Sphere)
- Don Winslow for The Kings of Cool (Heinemann)
 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Longlist
- Roger Hobbs for Ghostman (published by Transworld)
- Liz Jensen for The Uninvited (Bloomsbury)
- Malcolm Mackay for The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (Pan Macmillan)
- Stuart Neville for Ratlines (Random House)
- Mark Oldfield for The Sentinel (Head of Zeus)
- Andrew Williams for The Poison Tide (John Murray)
- Robert Wilson for Capital Punishment (Orion)
CWA John Creasy Dagger Longlist
- Roger Hobbs for Ghostman (Doubleday)
- Hanna Jameson for Something You Are (Head of Zeus)
- Malcolm Mackay for The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (Mantle)
- Becky Masterman for Rage Against the Dying (Orion)
- Derek B Miller for Norwegian by Night (Faber and Faber)
- Thomas Mogford for Shadow of the Rock (Bloomsbury)
- Michael Russell for The City Of Shadows (Avon)
- M D Villiers for City of Blood (Harvill Secker)
The CWA Chair, Alison Joseph said:
“The announcement of the Daggers Awards is always an exciting moment in the CWA’s calendar… The Awards Dinner is an opportunity to celebrate the best of our genre, to award our most talented authors and, most important of all, to introduce our ever-growing readership to more books they will enjoy.”
