Crime aplenty: Jo Nesbo and Denise Mina announced for 2012 New Zealand Arts Festival

In some terrific news that I can finally reveal, it's now been announced that there will be some strong crime writing content as part of the prestigious 2012 New Zealand Arts Festival, to be held in Wellington next year. The Festival will include 300 arts events over 24 days in late February and March next year, and a Writers & Readers Week is also part of the festivities. Amongst the visiting international writers for 2012 are two big names from European crime fiction: Norwegian Jo Nesbo, and Scottish writer Denise Mina.

I understand there will also be a New Zealand crime writing event, with several local writers. More details about the full Festival line-up will be released in due course. It's great to see important local festivals, such as the New Zealand Arts Festival, starting to embrace and include crime fiction, particularly local crime fiction, more and more, in their line-ups. I'm very much looking forward to the 2012 New Zealand Arts Festival.

You can read more about the international authors attending, and their events, here.

Galaxy Book Awards honour crime fiction and more

The 2011 Galaxy National Book Awards nominees have been released, with a few crime writers featuring. One of the Awards' eleven categories is for the Thriller & Crime Novel of the Year, but crime writers also feature in some of the other more general categories too.

The Galaxy National Book Awards tout themselves at 'the Oscars of the book industry', and they certainly highlight and celebrate a variety of books, with categories ranging from crime, to children's books, to cookery/food books, to biography/autobiography, to audiobooks, and more. It's good to see that crime/thriller writing has its own category (not every genre does, as there are catch-all categories like 'popular fiction' and 'paperback of the year', etc). The nominees for the Thriller & Crime Novel of the Year in association with iBookstore are:

• Before I Go To Sleep S.J. Watson (Doubleday)
• The Fear Index Robert Harris (Hutchinson)
• Heartstone C J Sansom (Pan)
• The Family Martina Cole (Headline)
• The Impossible Dead Ian Rankin (Orion)
• Trick Of The Dark Val McDermid (Sphere)

Acclaimed new crime writer SJ Watson, who recently won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for his debut Before I Go To Sleep, features strongly in the Galaxy line-ups; also receiving nominations for New Writer of the Year, and AudioBook of the Year.

American thriller writer Gregg Hurwitz is nominated in the Paperback of the Year category for his excellent thriller You're Next (read my review here, and my feature article on Hurwitz discussing that novel here). Norwegian star Jo Nesbo (The Leopard) has been nominated for International Writer of the Year, finding himself up against the likes of Haruki Murakami, and Booker nominee AD Miller (Snowdrops) has also been nominated in the New Writer of the Year category. It is nice to see crime getting something of a look-in, especially in awards which are made across genres. Though like any awards nominee lists, there's bound to be plenty to discuss in terms of people left off the list, and whether people think the nominated books are better than others that seem overlooked.

The winners will be revealed on 4th November at a ceremony at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in west London, which will be hosted by comedian Dara O'Briain. The event will be staged and filmed by Cactus TV, with a series of six programmes about the awards to be screened between 13th November and 17th December on More4. Cactus TV Managing DirectorAmanda Ross said, "It will be far more interesting for the viewers to experience the event in bite-size chunks spread across six shows, as we will be able to properly focus on the category winners."

You can read more about the 2011 Galaxy Book Awards at the website here. Graham Beattie has a full list of the categories and nominees here.

Nesbo in New Zealand: crime writing's rising Norwegian star heading our way in 2012

Last year there were a few rumours that Norway's Jo Nesbø, the crime writer who seems to be most picking up the Scandinavian crime writing baton and really running with it, was heading to Australia and New Zealand for the Christchurch Writers' Festival and other events. Unfortunately this did not happen - however in some excellent news, Nesbø's publisher has announced that he will "more than likely" be touring in a few months time, in early 2012. Nesbø's popularity and profile continues to grow and grow, so it would be terrific for keen crime readers to see him down this way.

Here's the official press release:

Detective Harry Hole fans will be delighted to hear his creator, Jo Nesbø, (photo above - Hakon Eikesdal), will more than likely be touring to New Zealand in late February 2012.


Nesbø will visit Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to do events and store-signings in each centre. A keen mountaineer, he’s sure to also squeeze in some serious climbing while he’s here.

The Norwegian economist, journalist, chart-topping pop musician and now hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime writer Jo Nesbø will be promoting ‘Phantom’ ― the follow-up to ‘The Leopard’, his heart-stopping thriller in which Harry Hole reluctantly returns to Oslo and becomes embroiled in a particularly disturbing case involving another serial killer who will stop at nothing to escape justice.

Nesbø’s new, stand-alone thriller about an art theft which goes wrong, ‘Headhunters’, is being published here on 19 August. All proceeds from this book, in all editions and formats including the movie adaptation, go directly to the ‘Harry Hole Foundation’: a charity set up to reduce illiteracy among children in the Third World.

HEADHUNTERS the movie is a top-notch crime thriller with bright, brilliant camera work and a twist-a-minute plot. HEADHUNTERS will be released in February 2012.

Nesbø and his complex Harry Hole (pronounced Hurler) detective hero are pretty much household names for crime fiction buffs.

It was on a long-haul fight to Sydney taking a break from his job as a stockbroker that Jo Nesbø famously penned the start of his first Harry Hole novel.

Harry Hole was an instant hit with Norwegians, with the first book in the series winning the ‘Glass Key Award’ for best Nordic crime novel ― an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. Nesbø has won numerous other awards across Europe, and his books have been shortlisted for the CWA and for the prestigious Edgar Awards. Six chilling international bestsellers later, totalling an estimated 3.5 million copies worldwide, the series is now published in 40 countries.

‘The Snowman’ has been optioned by Working Title Films, makers of ‘Fargo’, ‘Notting Hill’ and ‘Atonement’.

ENDS