Waterstones announced the shortlist for the bookstore chain's Debut Fiction Prize, an award for exceptional first novels voted on by booksellers. Celebrating debut fiction in all its forms, "the prize highlights the importance of discovering and championing new talent and acts as an extension of the alchemy of bookseller word-of-mouth recommendation." Two crime-themed titles on the list include Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, about two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own, and Kala by Colin Walsh, in which former friends, estranged for twenty years, reckon with the terrifying events of the summer that changed their lives. The winner will be announced on Thursday, August 24, 2023.
The year 2023 marks 120 years since the birth of Georges Simenon, and in celebration, the Liège's Grand Curtius Museum is mounting the exhibition "Simenon: Images of a World in Crisis" featuring photographs taken by Georges Simenon on his extensive travels in the 1930s. Between 1931 and 1935, Georges Simenon, an author best known for his detective Jules Maigret series, traveled the world and brought back reports, novels and thousands of photographs, often of very high quality. A selection of them is on display at the Grand Curtius, dotted along a tour that asks the following question: what does Simenon the photographer tell us about Simenon the novelist and reporter? How do the pictures complement or illuminate his writing? These photographs thus show Simenon immersed in his era and as an observer of history in the making, while providing the true setting for some of his greatest novels, such as Tropic Moon, The Window over the Way, and Avrenos’ Customers. Other events have also included literary readings, projection of films at the Les Grignoux cinema, and a symposium. (HT to The Bunburyist)
Thousands of writers including Nora Roberts, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Chabon, and Margaret Atwood have signed a letter asking artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Meta to stop using their work without permission or compensation. It's the latest in a flurry of efforts the literary world has launched in recent weeks against AI, although as NPR noted, protecting writers from the negative impacts of these technologies is not an easy proposition. According to a forthcoming report from The Authors Guild, the median income for a full-time writer last year was $23,000, and writers' incomes declined by 42% between 2009 and 2019. The advent of text-based generative AI applications like GPT-4 and Bard, which scrape the Web for authors' content without permission or compensation and then use it to produce new content in response to users' prompts, is giving writers across the country even more cause for worry.
In more of a "locked house" scenario, over 100 people were trapped for several hours in Greenway, the former home of famed British mystery writer Agatha Christie, in the English countryside on Friday. In a series of events which could have been lifted straight out of the pages of one of Christie’s mystery novels, the group of tourists were left stranded after stormy weather knocked down a tree, blocking the road leading down to the property in the county of Devon, southwest England. The stranded tourists kept themselves busy, drinking cups of tea in the houses’ tearoom and playing rounds of croquet on the lawn. I have a feeling Dame Agatha would approve, even if no bodies were to be found.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Midsummer Mischief!" by Sarah Das Gupta.
In the Q&A roundup, Colson Whitehead spoke with The Guardian about writing a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, the influence of Stephen King’s Carrie, and why he no longer makes fried chicken; Lisa Haselton chatted with thriller author Robert Creekmore about his new grit lit fantasy noir, Prophet’s Lamentation; and Elly Griffiths discussed embracing politics in her teens, discovering the thrill of George Eliot, and learning from Wilkie Collins for The Guardian's "Books in My Life" series.
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