Granite Noir 2024: Award Winners

Granite Noir 2024: Award Winners

Chaired by Peggy Hughes

Callum McSorley’s debut novel, Squeaky Clean – inspired by his years working at a car wash in Glasgow’s East End – was shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize and became the youngest ever winner of the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year.

Sophie White is a novelist, essayist and podcaster from Dublin. Her sixth book, and debut horror, Where I End – novel about being bound by the blood knot of family – won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel.

DV Bishop’s The Darkest Sin won the CWA 2023 Historical Dagger Award. Ritual of Fire is the third novel in the Cesare Aldo series – Growing religious fervour and a scorching heatwave drives Florence ever closer to madness, while someone is stalking powerful men

Callum McSorley

Callum McSorley is a writer based in Glasgow whose short stories have appeared in Gutter Magazine, Monstrous Regiment and New Writing Scotland. For his debut novel, Squeaky Clean – inspired by his years working at a car wash in Glasgow’s East End – Callum was shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize and became the youngest ever winner of the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year.

Sophie White

Sophie White is a novelist, essayist and podcaster from Dublin. She also holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from NCAD and she is currently the Arts Council Writer in Residence in DCU. She is the author of seven books. Her first four books, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill 2016), Filter This (Hachette, 2019), Unfiltered (Hachette, 2020) and The Snag List (Hachette, 2022) have been all bestsellers and award nominees. Her fifth book, the bestselling memoir Corpsing (Tramp Press, 2021), was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction. Her sixth book, Where I End (Tramp Press, 2022) was described as “brilliantly visceral”  by the Guardian and “exquisite and disturbing, brutish and beautifully crafted” by The Irish Times. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023) has just landed in bookshops.

Sophie writes a weekly column ‘Nobody Tells You’ for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine and her journalism has been nominated for numerous media awards. TV adaptations of her first two books are in development and she co-hosts the chart-topping comedy podcasts, Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive.

D.V.Bishop

D.V.Bishop is the pseudonym of award-winning writer David Bishop. His love for the city of Florence and the Renaissance period meant there could only be one setting for his crime fiction. The first book in the Cesare Aldo series, City of Vengeance, won the Pitch Perfect competition at Bloody Scotland 2018, and the NZ Booklovers Award for Best Adult Fiction Book. It was also shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Bishop was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship by the Scottish Book Trust while writing that novel. He teaches creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University. Ritual of Fire is the third novel in the Cesare Aldo series following The Darkest Sin.

Peggy Hughes

Peggy Hughes is Head of Programmes at the National Centre for Writing, a literature house dedicated to the exploration and celebration of the artform of writing based in Norwich. Previously, she worked in various literature organisations in Scotland, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scottish Poetry Library, Literary Dundee at the University of Dundee, and the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust. Peggy chaired Literature Alliance Scotland, Scotland’s largest network for literature organisations, from 2017 until August 2021 and is now a trustee. She is also on the board for the publishers 404Ink and the charity Open Book Reading, and frequently chairs literary events around the UK.