Wakefield wins Edgar Award
Adelaide-based author Vikki Wakefield has won the award for Best Paperback Original at the Edgar Allan Poe Awards for To the River (Text).
Published in the US under the name The Backwater by Poisoned Pen, To the River follows fugitive Sabine Kelly along the riverbanks of her small hometown as she returns to discover who committed the murders she was accused of 12 years before.
Announcing the winners, the Edgar Awards said of Wakefield’s novel: “As forceful and unrelenting as the river that drives its story, The Backwater is an evocative, layered thriller and a masterful examination of class and privilege about two women, pushed into isolation, who come together to take a stand for justice.”
Wakefield is the author of the adult thriller novels After You Were Gone and To the River, as well as YA novels including All I Ever Wanted, Friday Brown, Inbetween Days, Ballad for a Mad Girl, and This Is How We Change the Ending (all Text).
Other categories (and winners) in the Edgar Awards include:
Best Novel
- The Big Empty (Robert Crais, S&S UK)
Best First Novel by an American Author
- Dead Money (Jakob Kerr, Bantam Books)
Best Fact Crime
- Murderland (Caroline Fraser, Fleet)
Best Critical/Biographical
- Edgar Allan Poe: A Life (Richard Kopley, University of Virginia Press)
Best Juvenile
- Blood in the Water (Tiffany D Jackson, Scholastic)
Best Young Adult
- Under the Same Stars (Libba Bray, Atom).
The shortlists had also included various books by Australian authors.
Presented by the Mystery Writers of America, the 2026 Edgar Allan Poe Awards honour “the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction and television published or produced in 2025”.
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