2009 Dundee International Book Prize Winner Announced

A gritty crime novel has been unveiled as the winner of this year’s Dundee International Book Prize, a collaboration between the University of Dundee, Polygon and the newly unveiled ‘One City, Many Discoveries’ campaign.

Local writer Chris Longmuir has secured a publishing deal and will be awarded the £10,000 prize, the highest in the UK for an unpublished writer, for her fiction novel Dead Wood which is set in Dundee and uncovers the terrifying truth behind a serial killer who seems to take his fatal inspiration from the Templeton Woods murders of 1980.

Winning writer, Chris Longmuir, is an unpublished crime novelist as well as a published short story and article writer. Born in Wiltshire, Chris has lived in Scotland since the age of two and resides in Angus. She formed a lifelong addiction to the written word in early childhood and has long dreamt of seeing her own book published. Her short stories have appeared in ‘My Weekly’, ‘People’s Friend’, ‘Dark Horizons’ and small press anthologies, and she has had articles and reviews published widely.

Chris left school without any qualifications when she was fifteen, but obtained an Open University Degree at the age of forty and a postgraduate qualification in Social Work two years later. She has
recently acquired a qualification in criminology.  Dead Wood ’s main protagonist, Kara, has a debt to pay and turns to prostitution. On a job, she encounters murder victims - a grizzly find that leads her deep into a world of violence, gangland retribution and far away from her beloved children. 

Dead Wood is now published by Edinburgh-based Polygon see http://www.birlinn.co.uk/ for details.

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Sat, 27/06/2009 - 08:13 — Admin