SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL |
| First Deadline Looms for Famed CWA Daggers Posted: 19 Jul 2022 07:07 PM PDT
 Authors and publishers have until 31 July to nominate titles published in the first half of 2022 for the Crime Writers' Association (CWA) 2023 Dagger awards. The famed annual Daggers are the oldest awards in the genre and have been synonymous with quality crime writing for over half a century. Past winners of the awards include icons of the genre, including Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, John le Carré and Lee Child, and in the 2022 Daggers, awarded in a ceremony on 29 June, winners included MW Craven, Janice Hallet, Ray Celestin, Mark Billingham and Simone Buchholz. One of the UK's most prominent societies, the CWA was founded in 1953 by John Creasey; the awards started in 1955 with its first award going to Winston Graham, best known for Poldark. The CWA has undergone a refresh in recent years, updating and diversifying its Dagger judging panels and its board. To reflect the changes in the publishing landscape, the awards are now open to all traditionally published authors and to self-published authors who are CWA members, as well as publishers. The deadline is 31 July for nominating titles published between January and June 2022 and 15 November for those published between July and December. For the first time in many years, the Daggers 2023 will be awarded along with a cash prize. Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, said: "We are delighted not only to open the Daggers to author-nominations but also to recognise the very best crime writing in this way." Categories include the coveted Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller, sponsored by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the Fleming family-owned company that looks after the James Bond literary brand. The awards also recognise best historical crime novel, crime fiction in translation, the best short story, and the ALCS Gold Dagger for non-fiction titles. An annual highlight is the anticipated John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for the best debut novel. The Dagger judging panels include leading authors, bloggers, newspaper reviewers, academics and media professionals. The Daggers also provide a platform for unpublished writers, many of whom enter the Debut Dagger competition sponsored by ProWritingAid, and for authors who are favourites with libraries and their borrowers with the librarian-nominated Dagger in the Library. To enter visit the website: The CWA Daggers - The Crime Writers' Association |
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If you enjoyed this excellent and informative article you are going to love this non-promotional anecdote about real spies and authors from the espionage genre whether you’re a le Carré connoisseur, a Deighton disciple, a Fleming fanatic, a Herron hireling or a Macintyre marauder. If you don't love all such things you might learn something so read on! It’s a must read for espionage cognoscenti.
ReplyDeleteAs Kim Philby (codename Stanley) and KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky (codename Sunbeam) would have told you in their heyday, there is one category of secret agent that is often overlooked … namely those who don’t know they have been recruited. For more on that topic we suggest you read Beyond Enkription (explained below) and a recent article on that topic by the ex-spook Bill Fairclough. The article can be found at TheBurlingtonFiles website in the News Section. The article (dated July 21, 2021) is about “Russian Interference”; it’s been read well over 20,000 times.
Now talking of Gordievsky, John le Carré described Ben Macintyre’s fact based novel, The Spy and The Traitor, as “the best true spy story I have ever read”. It was of course about Kim Philby’s Russian counterpart, a KGB Colonel named Oleg Gordievsky, codename Sunbeam. In 1974 Gordievsky became a double agent working for MI6 in Copenhagen which was when Bill Fairclough aka Edward Burlington unwittingly launched his career as a secret agent for MI6. Fairclough and le Carré knew of each other: le Carré had even rejected Fairclough’s suggestion in 2014 that they collaborate on a book. As le Carré said at the time, “Why should I? I’ve got by so far without collaboration so why bother now?” A realistic response from a famous expert in fiction in his eighties.
Philby and Gordievsky never met Fairclough, but they did know Fairclough’s handler, Colonel Alan McKenzie aka Colonel Alan Pemberton CVO MBE. It is little wonder therefore that in Beyond Enkription, the first fact based novel in The Burlington Files espionage series, genuine double agents, disinformation and deception weave wondrously within the relentless twists and turns of evolving events. Beyond Enkription is set in 1974 in London, Nassau and Port au Prince. Edward Burlington, a far from boring accountant, unwittingly started working for Alan McKenzie in MI6 and later worked eyes wide open for the CIA.
What happens is so exhilarating and bone chilling it makes one wonder why bother reading espionage fiction when facts are so much more breathtaking. The fact based novel begs the question, were his covert activities in Haiti a prelude to the abortion of a CIA sponsored Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs? Why was his father Dr Richard Fairclough, ex MI1, involved? Richard was of course a confidant of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who became chief adviser to JFK during the Cuban missile crisis. So how did Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky fit in? You may well ask!
Len Deighton and Mick Herron could be forgiven for thinking they co-wrote the raw noir anti-Bond narrative, Beyond Enkription. Atmospherically it’s reminiscent of Ted Lewis’ Get Carter of Michael Caine fame. If anyone ever makes a film based on Beyond Enkription they’ll only have themselves to blame if it doesn’t go down in history as a classic espionage thriller.
By the way, the maverick Bill Fairclough had quite a lot in common with Greville Wynne (famous for his part in helping to reveal Russian missile deployment in Cuba in 1962) and has also even been called “a posh Harry Palmer”. As already noted, Bill Fairclough and John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) knew of each other but only long after Cornwell’s MI6 career ended thanks to Kim Philby shopping all Cornwell’s supposedly secret agents in Europe. Coincidentally, the novelist Graham Greene used to work in MI6 reporting to Philby and Bill Fairclough actually stayed in Hôtel Oloffson during a covert op in Haiti (explained in Beyond Enkription) which was at the heart of Graham Greene’s spy novel The Comedians. Funny it’s such a small world!