Gold Dagger and Man Booker longlists

The Crime Writers’ Association has unveiled its longlist for the coveted Gold Dagger award as well as naming the contenders for several of its other Daggers for 2011. The Gold longlist covers the following books, authors and publishers:

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (Pan)
Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder (Bantam Press)
Snowdrops by AD Miller (Atlantic Books)
The Cypress House by Michael Koryta (Hodder & Stoughton)
The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina (Orion)
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton (Orion)
The Villa Triste by Lucretia Grindle (Pan)
White Heat by MJ McGrath (Mantle)

At the same time, the Man Booker Prize longlist has also been unveiled, a literary award worth £60,000 to the winning author. It contains the following books, authors and publishers:

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape – Random House)
On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry (Faber)
Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate Books)
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (Granta)
Half Blood Blues: From Berlin to Paris. Two Friends. One Betrayal by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail)
A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards (Oneworld)
The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador – Pan Macmillan)
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman (Bloomsbury)
The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness (Seren Books)
Snowdrops by AD Miller (Atlantic)
Far to Go by Alison Pick (Headline Review)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone Press)
Derby Day by DJ Taylor (Chatto & Windus – Random House)

Now at this stage we’d love to break out a Venn diagram for you to point out that the only book common to both lists is Snowdrops by AD Miller, but our Excel skills aren’t that hot and getting it online might prove to be even more of a headache. So just take our word for it – if you’re at all influenced by longlists and have a scientific approach to book purchasing based on them, that’s the book to read.

Other Daggers to be awarded include the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, the John Creasy New Blood Dagger and the ITV3 People’s Best Seller Dagger. You can view these longlists here, but put 22 August in your diary because that’s when the shortlists for these prizes will be announced. And, on 1 September ITV3 will begin airing a six-part documentary series called the A to Z of Crime which will look at the work of five authors selected from the longlists we’ve just discussed. We can’t wait!

The Man Booker shortlist will be published 6 September.