8/25/2023 0 Comments Series lovely writer![]() It kind of just blossomed, from an accident. From there, I started reviewing for The Herald on Sunday, when Nicky Pellegrino did the book pages, then Canvas. We got some nice feedback about those reviews so we decided to occasionally do fiction reviews alongside the legal textbooks and true crimes. Can I review those? Can I review crime novels?” So I did. ![]() ![]() And my boss said to me, “Craig, have you read any good books lately? Can you write a book review to fill pages?” And I told her “Well, I’ve actually just read these two really cool New Zealand crime novels, one called The Ringmaster by Vanda Symon, and one called Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave. I was working for a legal magazine and one day when someone didn’t file their article we were stuck with a blank page, and we were going to the printer the next day. And I was like, oh, yeah, I read those when I was at Richmond primary school.īut I started reviewing in 2008 completely by accident. But after talking to Linwood Barclay, the great Canadian crime writer, he talked about The Hardy Boys as crime fiction. I used to say I started with Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. I mean, I’ve been reading crime since I was a kid, starting with The Hardy Boys. I’d only done a few little events, but I’d been reviewing for a while. Had you done much in the way of bookish work before that? Crime is a huge part of the market: for readers, libraries and bookshops. When I was thinking of starting the Ngaios, I could see that the romance writers in New Zealand had their awards and sci-fi/fantasy had the Sir Julius Vogel Awards. And that’s OK, but we just didn’t have that other award to honour that kind of book. There have been some crime-esque novels that have won or been shortlisted, but they’re often thought of as novels that have a lot of crime. I think they model themselves on things like the Booker Prize, or the Miles Franklin in Australia. Why do you think those awards tend to overlook crime? In New Zealand, no matter how well written, no matter how experimental, no matter how genre-busting, or whatever, the chances are we’d get overlooked for the Montanas. Over in the UK, if a crime writer wrote a great book, but they were getting ignored by the Booker Prize, it was fine because there was the CWA Daggers and now other awards like the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year, so they had their own way of honouring the best of the genre. All our contemporaries in the English-speaking Commonwealth had crime writing awards, except for us. I used to say, at the time, that New Zealand was the only English-speaking country other than Belize not to have a crime writing award: there were UK awards, multiple American crime writing awards, Australia had the Ned Kellys, Canada had the Arthur Ellis awards. Cheers! Let’s start with the awards: why did you start the Ngaio Marsh Awards?Ĭraig Sisterson: The basic answer is that I felt there was a significant gap, both in terms of New Zealand crime writing in a global sense, and New Zealand crime writing within the local scene. After ordering a pint (Craig) and a half (me) of Brixton IPA we spoke about his decade of supporting crime writers in Aotearoa.Ĭlaire Mabey: It’s so lovely to finally meet you Craig. Since we were finally in the same city, we decided to meet at his local: an olde worlde pub called Charles Holden. Probably because, although he manages to get home fairly regularly, Craig lives in London. I’ve heard a lot about Craig Sisterson over the years – as the “crime guy” from the Ngaio Marsh Awards and Twitter, and through word of mouth, too – but somehow we’d never met in person. Books editor Claire Mabey sits down with Craig Sisterson, mastermind of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, at the Charles Holden pub in Colliers Wood, London.
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