Amanda Peters and Cherie Dimaline among winners of 2024 Crime Writers of Canada Awards
Other winners include Nita Prose, Michael Lista and Joan Thomas
Amanda Peters and Cherie Dimaline are among the winners of the 2024 Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing.
The annual awards, created by the Crime Writers of Canada in 1984, uplift the best in mystery, crime, suspense fiction and crime nonfiction by Canadian authors.
Peters won the $1,000 first crime novel award for The Berry Pickers. In The Berry Pickers, a four-year-old girl from a Mi'kmaq family goes missing in Maine's blueberry fields in the 1960s. Nearly 50 years later, Norma, a young girl from an affluent family is determined to find out what her parents aren't telling her. Little by little, the two families' interconnected secrets unravel.
The Berry Pickers won the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named one of CBC Books' best fiction books of the year.
Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry living in Annapolis Valley, N.S. Her work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review and The Dalhousie Review. She was also the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers' Trust Rising Stars program.
Dimaline's Funeral Songs for Dying Girls won the $500 prize for best juvenile or YA crime book.
Funeral Songs for Dying Girls explores grief and haunting. Winifred has lived in an apartment above the Winterson Cemetery office with her father all her life. On the verge of its closure, rumours start spreading that the cemetery is haunted and Winifred begins to question everything she knows about life, love and death.
Cherie Dimaline is a bestselling Métis author best known for her YA novel The Marrow Thieves. The Marrow Thieves, was named one of Time magazine's top 100 YA novels of all time and was championed by Jully Black on Canada Reads 2018. Her other books include VenCo, Red Rooms, The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy, A Gentle Habit and Empire of Wild.
Nita Prose, Michael Lista and Joan Thomas are other notable winners.
Prose won the $500 Whodunit award for best traditional mystery for The Mystery Guest, the sequel to bestseller The Maid. The Mystery Guest sees Molly now risen through the ranks to become the Head Maid at the five-star Regency Grand Hotel. Things are looking great until world-renowned mystery author J.D. Grimthorpe drops dead in the hotel. Molly must look deep into her past to unlock clues that reveal her connection to Grimthorpe — and hopefully solve his murder.
Prose is a Toronto author and editor. She was formerly the Canadian vice president and editorial director for publishing company Simon & Schuster.
Lista won the $300 Brass Knuckles award for best nonfiction crime book for The Human Scale. The Human Scale is a firsthand look into investigative crime reporting — the writing process, the detail-oriented research and the fallout from publication.
Lista is a Toronto-based poet and journalist, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus and Toronto Life. He is the author of several books of poetry and a collection of essays. Lista was the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award Gold Medals for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story, The Sting, is being adapted into a television series for Apple TV+.
Thomas won the $500 Howard Engel Award for best crime novel set in Canada for her book Wild Hope. Wild Hope follows Isla and Jake, a couple who are slowly drifting apart. Isla's farm-to-table restaurant is failing and visual artist Jake is haunted by his late father's legacy in the oil and gas industry. Jake's childhood friend-turned-enemy Reg Bevaqua is a local bottled-water baron and harbours a seething resentment toward Jake. Reg is a demanding regular at Isla's restaurant and Jake is keeping a close eye on him. When Jake disappears after a winter camping trip all signs point to Reg and his magnificent Georgian Bay property — and Isla is determined to get to the bottom of it.
Thomas is the author of five novels. Her first novel, Reading by Lightning, won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean) and the Amazon First Novel Award. Her novel The Opening Sky was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction in 2014 and was awarded the Engel/Findley Award by the Writers Trust of Canada. Her novel Five Wives won the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
The complete list of winners is as follows:
- Peter Robinson Award for best crime novel: The Maid's Diary by Loreth Anne White
- Best crime first novel: The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
- Howard Engel Award for best crime novel set in Canada: Wild Hope by Joan Thomas
- Whodunit Award for best traditional mystery: The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose
- Best crime short story: Reversion by Marcelle Dubén
- Best French crime book (fiction and nonfiction): La sainte paix by André Marois
- Best juvenile or YA crime book are: Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline
- Brass Knuckles Award for best nonfiction crime book: The Human Scale by Michael Lista
- Best unpublished manuscript: Requiem for a Lotus by Craig H. Bowlsby
