Philip Kerr Wins RBA Prize

I'm a huge fan of Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy, featuring detective Bernie Gunther. For some reason I forgot to mention here on Mystery Fanfare that Kerr won the RBA International Award for Crime Writing. Luckily Craig Sisterton of Crime Watch (News and Musings on New Zealand and International Crime/Thriller Writing) reminded me. I also saw it on The Rap Sheet.

The RBA International Prize for Crime Writing was presented on September 3. It's the world's most lucrative prize in crime fiction (€125,000). Philip Kerr won for IF THE DEAD RISE NOT. Kerr said he was surprised at the size of the prize: "I recently got a prize in France which was a few bottles of wine."

Previous winners were the Spanish Spanish novelist Francisco González Ledesma for Una novela de barrio (A Neighborhood’s Novel) in 2007 and the Italian Andrea Camilleri for La muerte de Amalia Sacerdote” (Amalia Sacerdote’s Death) in 2008.

To read more on the RBA International Prize for Crime Writing on their website, go Here.

For a more critical look at the award, see Rhian Davies post on September 8 post on It's a Crime! Or a Mystery where she gives the rules of entry and points out that RBA Libros has published all three of the past winners in Spain.

125,000 Euros is a lot of money!