ATTENTION CRIME WRITERS:

Brio Books has announced a new unpublished manuscript prize, the Carter Brown Mystery Writing Award.

Established in conjunction with the Carter Brown Foundation and US-based Stark House Press, the new award is for novella-length works of adult crime or mystery writing (around 20,000 to 30,000 words).

The new prize is named in honour of British-born Australian author Alan Geoffrey Yates, who used the pseudonym Carter Brown for detective fiction. He wrote more than 350 novels and sold more than 100 million books. Yates was posthumously awarded a Ned Kelly Award in 1997, for his lifelong contribution to crime writing.

The award is open to all writers over the age of 18, and the winning entry will be published in May 2019 (pending acceptance of the publishing contract). The winner will be published by Brio Books in Australia and New Zealand, and by Stark House Press in the US and Canada.

Entries for the inaugural prize open on 1 August, and close on 31 October, with the winner announced in February 2019.

For more information, visit the award’s website.