It’s truly awards season in the literature space for African authors. The latest nominee in a book award is South African novelist Lauren Beukes for the Mulholland-published The Shining Girls and the award in question is The Strand Magazine Critics Awards 2013.
The Strand Magazine was a monthly magazine composed of fictional stories and factual articles first published in the United Kingdom from January 1891 to March 1950. It was brought back into publication in 1998 and has been published in fiction by several well-known writers including John Mortimer, Ray Bradbury, Alexander McCall Smith, Ruth Rendell, and Colin Dexter.
As you can tell these are mystery-type writers which is what we call to be Lauren’s “stronghold in these parts. Beukes other books include Zoo City and Moxyland. Her 2013 book The Shining Girls is about a time travelling serial killer who is being sought out by one of the people he failed to finish off.
Lauren Beukes is no stranger to winning awards going home with science fiction’s biggest prize the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2011 for Zoo City.
The list of nominees for the 2013 awards for Best Mystery Novel and Best First Mystery Novel are out and include;
Best Novel:
• The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland)
• Solo, by William Boyd (Harper)
• Sandrine’s Case, by Thomas H. Cook (Mysterious Press)
• A Serpent’s Tooth, by Craig Johnson (Viking)
• Ratlines, by Stuart Neville (Soho Press)
• The Double, by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown)
Best First Novel:
• Just What Kind of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly (Grove Press)
• Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs (Knopf)
• A Killing at Cotton Hill, by Terry Shames (Seventh Street)
• Walking Into the Ocean, by David Whellams (ECW Press)
• Norwegian by Night, by Derek Miller (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
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