Polish your tiara, don your dickie bow and make sure you have champagne on ice… the Crime Fiction Lover Awards are back!
We love crime fiction and want to celebrate the best of the best from 2024 — from books to authors to television shows — and we need your help to do so. Crime fiction wouldn’t be as strong as it is today without the input of enthusiastic and knowledgeable readers like you, who can spot a red herring at 20 paces. Now we want to mine your little grey cells for further insights.
Nominate your favourites in our six main categories (details below) and spread the word about the criminally good works that have made your year. It’s this reader participation that makes the Crime Fiction Lover Awards stand out and ensures they remain fun, surprising and relevant.
In addition to the six main categories, the Life of Crime Award will be presented again this year, bestowed upon an author that our editorial team believes has, over the course of their career, made an outstanding contribution to the genre. Since 2011, our contributors have reviewed nearly 3000 books and it’s their knowledge and discerning taste that will power this particular accolade.
If you’re in need of inspiration, you can view last year’s shortlists here and the final winners of the Crime Fiction Lover Awards 2023 here.
How it works…
As nominations for the Crime Fiction Lover Awards 2024 are now open, you can nominate across the following six categories:
Book of the Year
Best Debut
Best in Translation
Best Indie Novel
Best Author
Best Crime Show
To qualify for shortlisting, nominated books must have have been published in English between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024. For the Best Author category, the nominated author must have published crime fiction – whether novel, novella or short story collection – during the same period.
We know it can be difficult to define what an ‘indie’ crime novel actually is, particularly given that some independent publishers are actually very big and very well-resourced companies. However, those publishers are not what we have in mind here – we’re looking for novels published by small, independent companies with a turnover of under £2 million. This is our chance to champion small presses during tough times for the publishing industry.
You don’t need to nominate in every category if you don’t want to. If you don’t have a favourite for a particular category, just move on to the next. Our handy nomination form lets you do just that.
So, think about all the crime novels you’ve read over the last 12 months, as well as the television shows you’ve watched, and tell us about the big kahunas. We can’t wait to see what you’ll recommend.
To get started, you’ll find the nomination form here.
Voting on the winners
Nominations for this year’s awards will close at noon UK time on Wednesday 6 November 2024. After that, we’ll assemble shortlists for all the categories and then open a new online form for you to select the winners. In addition to a winner in each category, our team will select an Editor’s Choice award winner from each shortlist.
Let’s keep things above board
We know that when awards are open to online nominations and voting, it’s possible that the shortlists and winners may be subject to tampering of both the nefarious and well-intended kinds. Let’s face it, events like this get spammed all the time. For example, we’ve previously had people voting for the same book in multiple categories, including Best Crime Show!
With that in mind, we ask that you nominate sensibly and fairly, only entering books you’ve read and shows you’ve watched. However, in the event of chicanery, we do have measures in place to detect and eliminate spam nominations and votes.
The important thing is that the awards are being run in good faith, so please respect that. For our part, we’ll do our utmost to ensure that the awards are driven by our community and that everything is conducted equitably for all involved.
That being said, we absolutely LOVE running the awards – we’re fascinated to see who you nominate and vote for, and we love sending out the prizes following the thrilling denouement.