The Good Sister and Where We Begin win at the 2021 Davitt Awards

We are pleased to announce that The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth has won the Sisters in Crime’s 2021 Davitt Award for Best Adult Crime Novel and Where We Begin by Christie Nieman has won the Davitt Award for Best Young Adult Crime Novel. Selected from a list of 127 books, this is a huge achievement for both authors.

Both authors shared their responses…

“If I’m perfectly honest,” Sally Hepworth said, “it’s still a surprise to me that I write crime. I always start out with a happy, uplifting premise, and before I know it, I’m Googling the best instruments with which to bludgeon someone to death. I blame my teenage fixation with Law and Order SVU. That said, I like to think that there is a market for happy uplifting books that include a little bludgeoning – I may be wrong, but this is my line and I’m sticking to it.”

Sally’s next book, The Younger Wife, is out in November.

Christe Nieman said: “I have been plugging away at this career now for twenty years and my writing has been longlisted and shortlisted for various things, and this book itself has been shortlisted for two Premiers Lit Awards and the CBCA, but this is the first thing I have ever actually won. And for my first win to be awarded to me by a bunch of incredible women whose interest is lifting women’s writing, and to pay attention to women writing the darkness of the world into the open when so much crime is men’s crime, who wish to elevate women’s voices in this area… well, for myself to be lifted and recognised by Sisters in Crime – how absolutely bloody wonderful. And to get a trophy too. Oh, my giddy heart. Thank you.”

ABOUT THE BOOKS

Sally Hepworth is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, most recently The Good Sister (2020), which was an instant bestseller. Her novel, The Mother-In-Law (2019) has been optioned for a TV series by Hollywood actress and producer, Amy Poehler.

Where We Begin by Christie Nieman

Seventeen-year-old Anna is running into the night. Fleeing her boyfriend, her mother, and everything she has known.

She is travelling into the country, to the land and the grandparents she has never met, looking for answers to questions that have never been asked.

For every family has secrets.

But some secrets – once laid bare – can never be forgiven.

A dark, deeply compelling, coming-of-age YA novel from the author of As Stars Fall.

Christie Nieman is a Victorian writer, editor and playwright. She co-edited and contributed to Just Between Us (Pan Macmillan, May 2013) and has had playscripts and fiction published and professionally produced. Her play Call me Komachi, about teenage girls and sponsored relationships in Japan, was nominated for a major Green Room Award and played to sold-out audiences up and down the east coast.