McKinty, Safran win 2014 Ned Kelly Awards

8 September 2014 Books+Publishing

The winners of the 2014 Ned Kelly Awards for crime writing were announced at the Brisbane Writers Festival on 6 September.

The fiction award went to Adrian McKinty for In the Morning I’ll Be Gone (Serpent’s Tail), the final book in a political mystery-thriller trilogy set in Belfast during the 1980s. The judges described the novel as ‘quite extraordinary’. ‘There’s a fine line between social commentary and compelling mystery and not many writers, crime or literary, can do both,’ they said.

John Safran won the true crime award for Murder in Mississippi (Hamish Hamilton), which follows the aftermath of the murder of a white supremacist in Mississippi. ‘Always honest, frequently hilarious, Safran’s bumbling adventure never fails to captivate,’ said the judges.

The first fiction award was presented to Candice Fox for her horror-thriller Hades (Bantam), which the judges described as ‘a little bit Dexter, a little bit procedural, overall a great first novel built on a not-yet-hackneyed premise that will have readers looking forward to the sequel’.

The Sandra Harvey short story award went to Emma Viskic for ‘Web Design’.

View the full shortlists here. For more information about the awards, click here.

Category: Local news