2025 Daggers Open for Submission

 

You are invited to submit eligible titles to the new and expanded 2025 CWA Dagger awards, which are now open for entries. 

Daggers Submissions

The Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Daggers are considered a marker of excellence in the industry and have been synonymous with quality crime writing for over half a century. The awards are judged by independent expert panels. 

The oldest membership organisation for crime writers in the UK, the CWA was founded in 1953. It began its awards in 1955, with Agatha Christie as the principal guest at its first awards ceremony in 1956. 

2025 includes two new Daggers, announced earlier this year - the CWA Twisted Dagger and the CWA Whodunnit Dagger. Eligibility criteria for both can be found below. 

The CWA has also refreshed the name of two of its categories: the John Creasey New Blood is now known as the John Creasey First Novel Dagger, and the Debut Dagger is now the Emerging Author Dagger. 

Vaseem Khan, Chair of the CWA, said: “It’s always exciting when the Daggers open for submission, knowing that the very best books in the genre will shortly be winging their way to our independent judging panels. This year is extra special. Expanding the Daggers was one of my pledges as chair. The new Daggers recognise two subgenres that have grown to dominate the publishing landscape in recent years and I, for one, am excited to see who the first recipients of these Daggers will be. And in terms of refreshing the titles of the John Creasey New Blood and Debut Daggers – that was simply rectifying a longstanding point of confusion. The John Creasey First Novel Dagger is for a full-length debut novel while the Emerging Author Dagger is for early chapters of a work by an unpublished, unagented author.” 

Crime fiction is now the most popular genre in publishing, with this trend showing no signs of abating. 

The CWA’s mission is to promote the genre and act as a voice for the interests of its author members. 

The Daggers are one of the most inclusive genre awards, with categories for crime fiction in translation, short stories, and new authors, alongside the Gold Dagger for the novel of the year and Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller. 

Eligible books for the CWA Twisted Dagger are psychological thrillers (set in any period), suspense thrillers, and domestic noir. The Dagger will celebrate dark and twisty tales that often feature unreliable narrators, disturbed emotions, a healthy dose of moral ambiguity, and a sting in the tail. Judges for this Dagger are Gavin Bell (aka writer Mason Cross), Tracy Fenton (founder of THE Book Club on Facebook) and writer Susi Holliday 

Eligible books for the CWA Whodunnit Dagger include cosy crime (including the ‘modern cosy’), traditional crime, and Golden Age inspired mysteries. These books focus on the intellectual challenge at the heart of a good mystery and revolve around often quirky characters. The judges for this Dagger are writers, Steph Broadribb, Derek Farrell and Gytha Lodge. 

Submission guidelines for the 2025 Daggers are now live on the CWA website. 

The longlist will be announced at the CWA annual conference on 20th April, and the shortlist at the UK’s biggest crime fiction convention, CrimeFest, hosted in Bristol on Friday 10th May; the Dagger awards ceremony takes place in the summer. 

Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize are now open for submission

Today the Best Published Novel and New Voices Award submissions for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize has been opened. This mean that all three strands for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize are now open for submission.

See the website for more information. Here for Best Published Novel and here for New Voices Award.

Previous winners can be found here.

The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Historical, Sociological and Cultural Contexts/ Intersections/ Perspectives

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS—EDITED COLLECTION

Proposal/abstract deadline: November 1, 2020

Final essays due: April 2021

This volume, which will be proposed to a leading independent academic publisher, seeks to explore the implications of crime writing in its various narrative forms through essays which situate orientations fictional and non-fictional, past and present in relation to public perspectives. Just as real crime has served as inspiration for fictional accounts, Kieran Dolin reminds us in Fiction and the Law (Cambridge Press, 2009) that crime literature has long influenced popular understanding of social institutions as well. And so, we are not only interested in offering a comprehensive overview of crime writing in its diverse forms, but in examining how crime writing simultaneously reflects temporal biases and influences popular conceptions of politics, the law, psychology, the self, and more.

Over a century ago, in his examination The Sensational in Modern English Fiction (1919), Walter Clarke Phillips declared, “Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded — that is, the appeal to fear” (2). And, it is to this appeal that we owe the abundance of crime writing at our disposal— a trove of mystery that undoubtedly fascinates in its ability to entertain while safely reflecting the ugliest truths about ourselves and the societies in which we live.

It is in this vein that Catherine Nickerson asserts in “Murder as Social Criticism,” that crime fiction “is deeply enmeshed with most of the thornier problems of the Victorian, modern, and postmodern eras, including gender roles and privileges, racial prejudice and the formation of racial consciousness, the significance and morality of wealth and capital, and the conflicting demands of privacy and social control” (American Literary History). And, this is just as true of Gothic and Victorian Sensation novels which generally expose social anxieties in relation to cultural, institutional and individual identities as it is of the ever-growing contemporary genre of True Crime which typically concentrates “upon certain events and figures as kinds of cultural flashpoints, and it also has a long history, from colonial narratives to early twentieth-century pulp fiction” (Rosalind Smith, “Dark Places: True Crime Writing in Australia”).

We invite essays that provide new insights into the works of significant authors, series or sub-genres of crime literature that we once thought we knew and/ or examine the intersections of the real and fictional within the broader genre of Crime Writing in meaningful ways. Contributors are encouraged to dissect the historical, cultural, and/ or sociological significance of crime fiction, as well as examine how such works influence true crime writing or vice versa. Possible essay topics could include (but are not limited to) the following:

The History/Genesis of Mystery/Crime Writing and/or its Structure or Tenets

The Nineteenth-Century Police Force and the Detective Novel

Intersections between the Real and Fictional in Historical Crime Novels

British Aesthetic vs. American Hardboiled Crime

The Dime Novel and/or Early Hardboiled Fiction

The Police Procedural and Popular Culture

Historical Mystery as a Means of Contextualizing the Current

Crime Writing and Gender Roles

Racial Consciousness and Detection

Socio-economics of Crime and Detection

Socio-political Readings of the Gentleman Detective and/or Hardboiled Detective

Cross-Dressing and/or Queering in Mysteries

LGBTQ+ Portrayals in Mysteries

Intersections between Detective Film and Literature

Exploring Law through Literature/ Legal Thrillers

Lawyers and the Courtroom Drama

The Serial Killer and Contemporary Culture

Holmesian Influence/Pervasiveness in Western Culture

American Realism in Crime Writing

Capers/The Criminal Mind

Crime Fiction’s Influence on Journalistic Reporting/True Crime

(Neo) Gothic or (Neo)Victorian Sensation Novels

Please email 500-word abstracts along with a 200-word biographical statement to Meghan Nolan (mnolan2@sunyrockland.edu) and Rebecca Martin (doc.rmartin@gmail.com) by November 1st, 2020.

The deadline for selected essays of 5000-7000 words is April 2021.