The 2023 Ned Kelly Award Winners
The Australian Crime Writers Association (ACWA) has announced the winners of the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards.
Here are the recipients for each category:
Best Crime Fiction: Exiles by Jane Harper
At a busy festival site on a warm spring night, a baby lies alone in her pram, her mother having vanished into the crowds.
A year on, Kim Gillespie's absence casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather deep in the heart of South Australian wine country to welcome a new addition to the family.
Aaron Falk, federal investigator, is joining the celebrations. But as he soaks up life in the lush valley, he begins to suspect this tight-knit group may be more fractured than it seems. As hidden truths slowly emerge, Falk faces the darkest of questions.
The panel of judges praised Harper’s depth of characters and setting - a hallmark of her compelling and intricate style of storytelling.
Best Debut Crime Fiction: Wake by Shelley Burr
The small town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of New South Wales. Once a thriving outback centre, years of punishing drought have whittled it down to no more than a couple of pubs and a police station. And its one sinister claim to fame: the still-unsolved disappearance of Evelyn McCreery.
Mina McCreery’s life has been defined by the intense and ongoing public interest in her sister’s case. Now an anxious and reclusive adult, Mina lives alone on her family’s sunbaked destocked sheep farm. The million-dollar reward her mother established to solve the disappearance has never been paid out.
Enter Lane Holland, a private investigator who dropped out of the police academy to earn a living cracking cold cases. Lane has his eye on the unclaimed money, but he also has darker motivations for wanting to solve the case.
The panel of judges said it was heartening to see such strong talent coming through in this next wave of Australian crime writers calling Wake 'an astounding achievement for a first-time author’.
Best True Crime: Betrayed by Sandi Logan
The relentlessly fascinating, sometimes hilarious and often jaw-dropping true story of two American women who became unwitting drug mules by driving a hashish-laden campervan from Stuttgart to Bombay, then later to Australia, where they were arrested and jailed.
In 1977, Vera ‘Toddie’ Hays and Florice ‘Beezie’ Bessire thought they were about to embark on the trip of a lifetime when Vera’s nephew, Vern Todd, offered them a campervan to drive from Germany to India. Little did the women know that Vern and his accomplices would secretly pack two tonnes of hashish into the vehicle along the way.
This shocking inside story chronicles Toddie and Beezie’s wild ride across continents and oceans to our shores, their arrest by Australian Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents, and all that the women faced in the aftermath.
The judges said the entries in the true crime category continue to showcase the very best in Australian investigative non-fiction writing.
Best International Crime Fiction: The Lemon Man by Keith Bruton
TASKS: 1. Buy Food. 2. Visit Ma. 3. Kill Henry O'Neil.
The Lemon Man is Patrick Callen, a bicycle-riding hitman with mild O.C.D. in Dublin, Ireland whose carefully ordered life is totally upended when he becomes the accidental caretaker of a baby boy. Now he’s got to balance his daily to-do list of errands and murders-for-hire with his unexpected domesticity, which impacts him and his work in ways he never expected…and that could get him killed.
Judge Ron Blaber calls The Lemon Man a truly great read, saying 'it is a warm funny and compassionate story written in a wonderfully original voice'.