Our Crime Expert (in books, not IRL) Fiona Hardy gives us a round-up of the Ned Kelly Award Winners of 2013.

Gosh, it’s nice that the weekend had such a great vote, huh? I mean, who wasn’t happy with its outcomes? It’s so great that everyone’s on board with the victors, and that we all get a happier literary world, and it’s all thanks to Queensland.

Yes, that’s right: the 2013 Brisbane Writers Festival hosted the Ned Kelly Awards this year, and the winners are all totally deserving. (You didn’t really think I meant that appalling man who thinks women should shut up and stay in the kitchen do you? I’ll tell him where to stick his damn kitchen.)

Zane Lovitt won Best First Fiction with The Midnight Promise, a noir set of stories about a private investigator who slowly derails in his Chinatown office-cum-sleeping quarters throughout each tale. Each story is based loosely on truth, despite how quirky-to-painful they are. This is the kind of book I have been happily recommending to everyone since it was released last year - it’s dark, it’s funny, and it’s the kind of delight that’s so unique to crime.

Best Fiction was awarded to Geoffrey McGeachin for his fantastic 1950s-set Blackwattle Creek. Charlie Berlin is a cop on holiday, but as all wise readers know, criminals don’t respect vacation boundaries. His wife asks him to check up on a recently bereaved widow, but what the dead man reveals is the start of a pretty unpleasant investigation that feeds off Cold War paranoia and sketchy politics.

Dubbed the ‘Oskar Schindler of Asia’, Ali Al Jenabi’s story is told in Non-Fiction Winner The People Smuggler by Robin de Crespigny. People smugglers are shown in Australia as money-hungry criminals who destroy lives, but Iraqi Al Jenabi’s path from prisoner to smuggler is not as cut and dried. Unable to help his family gain asylum in Australia through legal channels, he resorts to illegal means - but not everyone sees his acts as deserving of punishment.

The Sandra Harvey Short Story Award went to Roger Vickery for ‘Echoes from the Dolphin’. Both you and I will be able to get our paws on it with the release of Scribe’s third New Australian Stories anthology later this year.

So, if the weekend otherwise left you unhappy, don’t commit any crimes in despair. It’s much more fun to read about them instead.

Fiona Hardy