Sisters in Crime General - Sisters in Crime Australia

Murder Monday: Jacqueline Bublitz

Jacqueline Bublitz won an amazing two Sisters in Crime’s Davitt Awards on 27 August for Before You Knew My Name – Best Debut Book and the Readers’ Choice award. All 169 books in contention competed for this award as decided by the 500+ members of Sisters in Crime. Before You Knew My Name has the unusual distinction of being narrated by a dead woman. She spoke to Karina Kilmore, debut crime writer, journalist, and interviewer for Sisters in Crime Australia, about her novel approach and how she crafted her book.

Crime wave hits Cobargo

Seven of Australia’s most popular female crime writers converged on the South Coast in August for a Sisters in Crime two-day writers festival on August 27 and 28. Candice Fox, Vikki Petraitis, Sulari Gentill, Fleur Ferris, Ilsa Evans, Professor Caroline de Costa, and Dorothy Johnston debated all matters crime before 100 people packed into the Cobargo Hall and a live-streamed global audience.

2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

Entries are now open for the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Now in its 38th year, the Awards celebrate the country’s finest literary offerings, with prizes for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, writing for young adults, Indigenous writing, and the overall Victorian Prize for Literature, worth an additional $100,000 – the single most valuable literary award in the country.⁠ …

D I Ray: TV review by Siobhan Mullany

Parminder Nagra (Bend it like Beckham) plays DI Rachita Ray with restraint. She is a detective promoted to Homicide as a token dark person. She has been brought in against the wishes of her bosses. They do not support her. She sucks it up. In her private life, she is equally restrained. I don’t love DI Ray but I want a second series. I want to see her succeed … I want those in charge to be made accountable. Is this misdirected fury at Morrison?

A dead woman narrator: Jacqueline Bublitz

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz is narrated by a young dead woman in New York. The book has won an amazing two Davitt Awards – for Best Debut and Readers’ Choice, as judged by the 500+ members of Sisters in Crime. Jacqueline splits her time between Melbourne and New Zealand and, luckily for us, crossed the ditch to accept the awards.

You can’t even spell! S. D. Hinton

S. D. Hinton didn’t know she was dyslexic until she was an adult. She went through school in an era where dyslexia was rarely recognised, and poorly understood, if it was. Sufferers were usually labelled as inattentive or not very bright. That constrictive label, reinforced from prep, became part of who she was. Find out how she put her disability to good use – and how it adds to her creativity.

The Crime Stack: 35 books across 7 titles. Bumper haul!

Thanks to our friends at Allen & Unwin this month’s Crime Stack member book draw is huge. 35 books across 7 titles! And such ripper books too. If you want to be in the draw you need to be a member. Click on Read More to find out … more!

The Crime Stack: Those Who Perish by Emma Viskic

This month’s member draw is for the addictive new Caleb Zelig thriller from multi-award winning Sisters member Emma Viskic. A remote island. An isolated community. A killer picking the off one by one. And Caleb’s brother is in the firing line.
How to be in the draw? Be a member!

Shining bright: Kimberley Starr

I really wanted to consider how much we can rely on other people, and how self-interest can be a corrupting influence. But there were other things I was wondering about as well and I think those wonderings worked their way into the mysteries in the plot. For instance, living as a colonising people, what should our relationship be to the land that we only claim to own because our ancestors stole it?

The two-hander in storytelling: Shelley Burr

Stripped down to its most basic form, crime fiction is about concealing information from the reader, and then gradually revealing it. This is one of the reasons why the genre tends to favour telling its stories through a single point of view character, often the detective, in first person or close third person.