Ruth Wykes, the judges’ coordinator, said that there had been a seismic shift with debut books.
“Increasingly, debut books are polished and sophisticated. There is nothing at all amateurish about them,” she said.
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS!
Monica Vuu was born in Langley, British Columbia, and moved to Tasmania in 2019 with her Australian partner. When One of Us Hurts came out of a 90-day novel writing course and Vuu says it was inspired by the remoteness of rural Tasmania.
The judges said that it “takes courage to write a story like When One of Us Hurts and to portray a small, tight-knit community in a way that is at times familiar to readers of crime fiction, and at other times it’s uncomfortably confronting. Richly gothic at heart and fuelled by a multitude of masterful misdirects, When One of Us Hurts is a chilling foray into simmering small-town secrets, family tensions, and mental illness.”
Eleanor Jones Is Not a Murderer, the YA-winning novel by Amy Doak, features Eleanor, the new girl at high school, who is falsely accused of stabbing another student and sets out to clear her name. The judges “all connected with Eleanor and loved her banter with the reader throughout the book. She was such a terrific character: bolshie and cynical, yet secretly vulnerable”. The sequel, Eleanor Jones Can’t Keep a Secret, was released in July.
Justice and the voices of women were at the heart of Rebecca Hazel’s Non-Fiction winner –The Schoolgirl, Her Teacher and His Wife. The judges reported, “This book focuses on ‘The Schoolgirl’ JC and Lynette Simms, the victims of Chris Dawson, now convicted of the murder of his first wife Lynn. Without Hazel’s curiosity and groundwork – conversations with JC when they worked together at a women’s refuge – Dawson would never have come to account for his crimes.
The prospect of turning 60 prompted Christine Keighery (who also writes as Chrissie Perry) to try her hand at an adult novel. She is the author of more than thirty-five novels for children and Young Adults, including 13 books in the hugely successful Go Girl! Series. Her work has been published in ten countries, including the US, UK, Spain, Brazil, Slovenia, and Korea.
The judges were thoroughly entertained and impressed by Lucinda Gifford’s children’s book, Boris in Switzerland, “an original take on the traditional boarding school mystery with the addition of an endearing family of anthropomorphic wolves. With witty, expressive illustrations on almost every page, it is jam-packed with the talent, passion, and esteem for readership of author-illustrator Lucinda Gifford."
Gifford said that as a life-long lover of mysteries and elaborate literary twists, she had been plotting for years to ‘move into crime’.
Alison Goodman is the author of eight novels including her latest release The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies which was a Washington Post and an Amazon Best Mystery Book of 2023. Set in the Regency era, its sleuths are two clever older women solving crimes by using skills and knowledge they have developed through their lives.
The 2024 Davitt Awards were again supported by the Swinburne University of Technology
The Davitts are named after Ellen Davitt, the author of Australia’s first mystery novel, Force and Fraud, in 1865. The awards are handsome wooden trophies featuring the front cover of the winning novel under perspex. No prize money is attached.
