The longlists were announced last night at an event hosted by the Crime Writers’ Association in London. The authors longlisted for each of the daggers are:

For the CWA Gold Dagger: Wiley Cash, N.J. Cooper, Colin Cotterill, M.R. Hall, Gene Kerrigan, Alice LaPlante, Simon Lelic and Chris Womersley.

For the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: Megan Abbott, Alex Berenson, Charles Cumming, Robert Harris, Ryan David Jahn, Alan Judd, Simon Lelic and Neal Stephenson.

Huge thanks to the CWA, and congratulations to all the other nominees. The shortlists will be announced later this summer, and the winners will be televised as part of the 2012 Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards in the autumn.

For more, visit the CWA website.

Full details of the event, as well as others in the series, are available on the EESC’s website. Attendance is free of charge, but requires a reservation in advance. If the weather is fine, we’ll be sitting outside, so don’t forget to bring your sunglasses.

Details of the event will be released when the full programme is published in the spring, but in the meantime you can see a list of all the other authors attending here.

The Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival takes place between 19-22 July 2012 at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate. See you there!

The Child Who

The book looks (and feels!) terrific. Pleasingly, it’s also had some great early reviews. The Guardian asked whether The Child Who would be ‘Lelic’s breakthrough book’. ‘It deserves to be,’ the paper said. Keep updated on the latest feedback here.

Also, and as ever around a launch date, I’ve been doing lots of interviews and Q&As, so don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to keep up with the latest news. Some of the links are also posted here.

Buy your copy of The Child Who now at one of these retailers, or at your local bookshop. The book will be published as a paperback original in the US by Penguin in March 2012.

The Facility

Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles, one of five members of the selection panel, said, “With his fragile, sympathetic characters, Lelic has the same ability to make us look at the society we’re creating as John le Carré.”

My thanks to Jonathan for his kind words, and to The Independent for including my novel on their list, which includes some terrific new books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as a number of classics.

For a full list of the fifty titles selected, click here.

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet was kind enough to describe the book as ‘a heart-rate-destabilising novel about the outbreak of a sinister new disease, the authorities’ reactions and a pair of would-be whistleblowers . . . This is one fiendish, impressive book.’

Click here for an online stockist, or visit your local bookshop to get yourself a copy. And, once you’ve read it, don’t forget to let me know what you think of it by sending me a message.

The Macavity Awards are nominated and voted on by members of Mystery Readers International and the winners will be announced at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, in St. Louis, USA, in September. The awards, surely winners themselves of the Coolest Named Literary Awards Award, take their moniker from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

The shortlists in full are as below. Congratulations to all the other nominees!

Best Mystery Novel
The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)
Faithful Place by Tana French (Viking)
The Queen of Patpong by Timothy Hallinan (HarperCollins-William Morrow)
Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (Grove Atlantic)
Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard (Ballantine)

Best First Mystery Novel
The Damage Done by Hilary Davidson (Forge)
Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva (Forge-Tom Doherty Associates)
The Poacher’s Son by Paul Doiron (Minotaur)
Full Mortality by Sasscer Hill (Wildside)
A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic (Viking)

Best Mystery-Related Nonfiction
The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum (Penguin)
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making by John Curran (HarperCollins)
Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction edited by Maxim Jakubowski (New Holland)
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang (W.W. Norton)
Thrillers: 100 Must Reads edited by David Morrell and Hank W Wagner (Oceanview Publishing)

Best Mystery Short Story
“The Scent of Lilacs” by Doug Allyn (EQMM)
“Swing Shift” by Dana Cameron in Crimes by Moonlight: Mysteries from the Dark Side (Berkley)
“Devil’s Pocket” by Keith Gilman in Philadelphia Noir (Akashic)
“The Gods for Vengeance Cry” by Richard Helms (EQMM)
“Bookworm” by G.M. Malliet in Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’ (Wildside)

Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery
A Marked Man by Barbara Hamilton (Berkley)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Random House)
City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley (Minotaur)
The Red Door by Charles Todd (HarperCollins- William Morrow)
The Fifth Servant by Kenneth Wishnia (HarperCollins-William Morrow)

Click here to listen – and watch. We talk about bullying – here and in the US – the challenge of writing from a female perspective, my experiences being bullied and, of course, the weather.

Leith’s The Coincidence Engine mashes up a gaggle of fantastical characters (including a mathematician and the thuggish operatives of a multinational arms conglomerate) in a tale of an imaginary America haunted by madness, murder, mistaken identity and unhealthy snacks. If you have made it this far into my website, you should know all about The Facility, which will be available in paperback at the festival for the first time. Leith and I have been paired under the title ‘States of the Imagination’.

Tickets will be available to buy from 26 June for £10 (£8 concessions). The event will take place in the Peppers Theatre at 4pm on Saturday 20 August, and the festival runs from 13-29 August. Visit www.edbookfest.co.uk for further details.

The judging panel described the book as ‘brilliantly, and innovatively, constructed in a series of distinguishable voices . . . a tapestry of sympathy and condemnation in shockingly unequal terms’ – which is incredibly flattering! Previous winners include Sarah Waters, Zadie Smith, Alex Garland, Maggie O’Farrell and the brilliant Jon McGregor (for If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, one of my favourite novels of the past decade).

The judges were Paul Bailey, Frances Fyfield and Shena Mackay – I didn’t get a chance to thank them all personally at the award ceremony last night, so will take the opportunity here. My thanks, too, to the Society of Authors, not only for the award, but also for hosting such an excellent evening. And congratulations to all the other winners, a full list of whom appears here.