Saturday, June 06, 2009

International Dagger Shortlist Announced

Crime Scraps is on the case and has alerted the FriendFeed crime and mystery room of the shortlist for the CWA International Dagger which was listed in today's Times. (The website link is currently broken). The full list of possible choices and my speculations can be found here.

Crime Scraps reports that my musings were fairly accurate and that four of my six choices have been selected:
Karin Alvtegen - Shadow (translated by McKinley Burnett)
Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Played With Fire (translated by Reg Keeland)
Johan Theorin - Echoes From The Dead (translated by Marlaine Delargy)
Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man (translated by Sian Reynolds)

plus

Arnaldur Indridason - Arctic Chill (translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb)
Jo Nesbo - The Redeemer (translated by Don Bartlett) (=>Crime Scraps's review)
The CWA website has the reasons behind each of the choices.

5 comments:

Roger Cornwell said...

Hey, that was fast...
I was about to alert you to the fact that I had just put the shortlists online and you seem to have linked to them already!

I have alerted The Times to that broken link and they are on the case.

I enjoyed your International Dagger Speculation: you listed all six of the shortlist among the sixty in that post. Just to point out that in order to be considered, books have to be put forward by their publishers, which could explain why some of your list weren't on the CWA's. In particular, the rules say only one book per author may be put forward, and your list wasn't constrained by that.

On the other hand, the same rule does not apply to translators, for which Steven T. Murray (aka McKinley Burnett and Reg Keeland) must be grateful.

Regards,
Roger Cornwell (CWA webmaster)

Uriah Robinson said...

McKinley Burnett is another pseudonym for our friend Steven Murray alias Reg Keeland.

Karen (Euro Crime) said...

Hi Roger, thanks for thinking of us. It's my Saturday off and its raining so I was lucky to be a the pc at the right time :). I didn't realise about the one book per author rule. Thanks for the info.

Yes "Reg" has a 1 in 3 chance of winning!

Dorte H said...

What a great selection :)
I have read books by five of the six authors.

Roger Cornwell said...

An update: readers can now comment on the books shortlisted for the International Dagger on our forum at thecwa.co.uk/forum, and also on books they would like to see on the shortlist for the Gold Dagger, which will be revealed on 15 July.

To be eligible, books must have been published in the UK between 1 June 2008 and 31 May 2009 -- US and other publication dates are almost guaranteed to be different.

Regards,
Roger Cornwell (CWA webmaster)