Author Ace Atkins will receive the 2026 Harper Lee Award, organizers of the Monroeville Literary Festival have announced. The elite club of previous winners includes E.O. Wilson, Winston Groom, Rick Bragg, and Fannie Flagg. According to festival organizers, the award "recognizes the lifetime achievement of a writer either born in Alabama or strongly connected to the state." A former Auburn Tiger and sports and crime reporter, Atkins published his first crime novel, Crossroad Blues, in 1998. He's since published several novels in the Nick Travers and Sheriff Quinn Colson series, as well as standalone titles and a series of "Spenser" novels, continuing the franchise launched by the late Robert B. Parker. The festival and award presentation will take place Feb. 26-28, 2026.
A group of more than 70 authors including Dennis Lehane, Paul Tremblay, Chuck Wendig, and Gregory Maguire released an open letter on Friday about the use of AI, asking publishing houses to promise "they will never release books that were created by machines." The letter contains a list of direct requests to publishers concerning a wide array of ways in which AI may already — or could soon be — used in publishing. It asks them to refrain from publishing books written using AI tools built on copyrighted content without authors' consent or compensation, to refrain from replacing publishing house employees wholly or partially with AI tools, and to only hire human audiobook narrators — among other requests. Meanwhile, some of the many intellectual property lawsuits against unlawful AI use are still wending their way through the courts.
Some sad news this week: The Washington Post reported that Jane Stanton Hitchcock has died at the age of 78 after losing her struggle with pancreatic cancer. Hitchcock was a socialite, playwright, poker aficionado, and author of crime novels such as Trick of the Eye (1992), which was turned into a made-for-TV film starring Ellen Burstyn and Meg Tilly, and Bluff (2019), which was awarded the Hammett Prize by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch. FYI, the Q&A with the author on this blog, which was referenced in the Washington Post article, can be found via this link.
Janet Rudolph posted her updated list of Fourth of July Crime Fiction on her Mystery Fanfare blog.
This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry is "D for Dallas" by Roger Netzer.
In the Q&A roundup, Deborah Kalb chatted with Gloria Chao, author of the new novel, The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club, and also spoke with Julia Seales, author of the new novel, A Terribly Nasty Business, the sequel to her novel, A Most Agreeable Murder; and Camilla Trinchieri (aka Camilla Crespi), applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Murder in Pitigliano, the fifth title in her Tuscan mystery series.
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