2025 Ngaio Marsh Awards Finalists Announced

 

Character first: 2025 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists 

offer page-turning tales that explore people and place.

From a young Māori chef to a grieving family torn asunder by internet disinformation, wartime spies to comical Northland drug runners, the finalists for the 2025 Ngaio Marsh Awards offer readers a kaleidoscopic array of unforgettable characters, fictional and real, among compelling tales full of mystery and thrills, touching on vital issues of modern times and eras past.

“In our fifteenth anniversary season of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, we’ve been blessed with a fascinating range of entries across our three categories, from a diverse array of Kiwi voices and stories, styles, and settings, making our international judging panels’ jobs both very enjoyable and at times very tricky,” says Ngaio Marsh Awards founder Craig Sisterson.

Now in their sixteenth season, the Ngaio Marsh Awards celebrate excellence in mystery, thriller, crime, and suspense writing from Aotearoa storytellers. The 2025 finalists were announced today in Best Non-Fiction, Best First Novel, and Best Novel categories.

“As the likes of Val McDermid and Dennis Lehane have said, if you want to better understand a place, read its crime fiction,” says Sisterson. “Crime writing in its wider sense can deliver interesting insights alongside rollicking entertainment, and is an ideal form for delving into people and place, as well as broader societal issues. And in our case with the Ngaios, we certainly see that across both our fiction and non-fiction entries and finalists.”

The Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non-Fiction is a biennial prize first presented in 2017, and previously won by Michael Bennett, Kelly Dennett, Martin van Beynen, and Steve Braunias. From a fascinating array of 2025 entrants, this year’s six finalists explore some truly remarkable real-life tales, ranging from a fresh look at New Zealand’s most infamous cold case to the little-discussed deadly legacy of a 1930s Devonport nurse. 

The finalists are:

The Trials of Nurse Kerr by Scott Bainbridge (Bateman Books)

The Survivors by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)

The Crewe Murders by Kirsty Johnstone & James Hollings (Massey Uni Press)

The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour & Jude Dobson (Allen & Unwin)

Gangster's Paradise by Jared Savage (HarperCollins)

Far North by David White & Angus Gillies (Upstart Press)

This year’s finalists for the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel, an annual award first presented in 2016, and won last year by Rotorua author Claire Baylis for DICE, her extraordinary novel providing a jury-eyed-view of a sexual assault case, are:

Dark Sky by Marie Connolly (Quentin Wilson Publishing)

Lie Down With Dogs by Syd Knight (Rusty Hills)

A Fly Under The Radar by William McCartney

The Defiance of Frances Dickinson by Wendy Parkins (Affirm Press)

The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin)

Kiss of Death by Stephen Tester (Heritage Press)

“It’s really heartening each year to see the range of new voices infusing fresh perspectives into the crime and thriller backstreets of our local literary landscape,” says Sisterson. This year that ranges from a mystery set at Tekapo's Mt John Observatory to a legal thriller set against the Spanish flu epidemic, from a blackly comic crime caper from a Devonport lawyer to the gritty first novel from one of our most acclaimed screen storytellers.

Lastly, the finalists for the 2025 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel, selected by an international panel of crime and thriller experts from a remarkable 15-book longlist, are:

Return to Blood by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)

A Divine Fury by DV Bishop (Macmillan)

Woman, Missing by Sherryl Clark (HarperCollins)

Home Truths by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)

17 Years Later by JP Pomare (Hachette)

The Call by Gavin Strawhan (Allen & Unwin)

Prey by Vanda Symon (Orenda Books)

“It’s a dazzling group of finalists to emerge from a terrific longlist, and a fascinating broader group of entries that seems to get deeper and stronger every year,” says Sisterson. “Our international judges were full of praise for the entire longlist, and remarked on the world-class writing as well as compelling storytelling in many books that didn’t become finalists, as well as the overall variety within #yeahnoir, our Kiwi take on a globally popular genre.”

The 2025 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists will be celebrated and this year’s winners announced at a special event, “The Ngaio Marsh Awards and The Murderous Mystery”, to be held in association with WORD Christchurch at Tūranga on Thursday, 25 September. The thrilling evening includes an improv murder mystery performance by the famed Court Theatre

2022 Ngaio Marsh Awards Winner Announced

 Giving victims a voice: debut novel sweeps 

2022 Ngaio Marsh Awards

History was made at a special WORD Christchurch event on Thursday night as Taranaki author Jacqueline Bublitz’s first novel was revealed as the winner of both categories of the 2022 Ngaio Marsh Awards

In the thirteenth instalment of Aotearoa’s annual awards celebrating excellence in crime, mystery, and thriller writing, Bublitz scooped both the Best First Novel and Best Novel prizes for Before You Knew My Name (Allen & Unwin). It is the first time any Kiwi storyteller has won both fiction categories.

“Beautifully heart-breaking, stylishly written, and boldly pushing the envelope of crime fiction,” said the international judging panels. “Bublitz delivers a beguiling tale with great characterisation: Alice and Ruby are wonderful. This is a tragic but warm-hearted crime novel that gives victims agency and voice.”

Ngaio Marsh Awards founder Craig Sisterson noted that while a few excellent debuts have been shortlisted for both categories over the past several years, Before You Knew My Name is the first book to ever win two Ngaio Marsh Awards. Bublitz also joins Christchurch author and international bestseller Paul Cleave, a three-time Best Novel winner, as the only Kiwi storytellers with multiple Ngaios. So far.

“It’s a remarkable achievement by Jacqueline,” added Sisterson, “especially given the strength of the Best Novel category this year, which included past Ngaios winners in Cleave and RWR McDonald, a four-time finalist in Ben Sanders, a two-time Ockhams longlistee in Kirsten McDougall, and a many-times New York Times bestseller in Nalini Singh. Our judges really loved many different books, it was a tough decision.”

The international judging panels for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards comprised leading crime fiction critics, editors, and authors from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England, Scotland, and the United States.

While Before You knew My Name shares an inciting incident familiar to any viewer of US cop shows – a jogger in New York City finds the body of a young woman – in her debut Bublitz flips the script by taking readers deep into the lives of Alice and Ruby, the victim and the jogger, rather than the detectives.

On Thursday night, Bublitz was presented with the Best First Novel prize by bestselling Australian author Michael Robotham, then the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel by Scottish queen of crime Val McDermid. Before the audience found out whowunnit, Robotham and McDermid had entertained attendees in a thrilling panel with past Ngaios winner JP Pomare, as part of the trio’s Crime After Crime tour of New Zealand.

The two Ngaio Marsh Awards add to a list of accolades for Bublitz’s debut that include winning General Fiction Book of the Year at the ABIA Awards, being shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger in the UK, and winning the Debut Crime and Readers’ Choice prizes at the Davitt Awards of Sisters in Crime Australia.

Before it was published, Bublitz worked on Before You Knew My Name for several years, including living in New York City, “ostensibly for research” in 2015, and persisting through dozens of rejections. She finally completed the novel in the aftermath of her beloved father’s death in 2019, after returning to New Zealand from two decades in Melbourne. “I realised what I was trying to say, which is look at what we lose when this kind of crime happens,” she said. “I was going through my own experience of loss and thinking about mortality, and I changed some of the narrative and became a lot more clear on Alice’s journey.”

Bublitz’s prizes include two trophies, $1,000 courtesy of WORD Christchurch, long-time partner of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, and a cash prize from the Ngaios. Her book is released in US hardcover in November.