Mike Cooper won the $25,000 MysteriousPress.com Award for The Downside. The contest solicited unpublished manuscripts from both established authors and newcomers. The prize money is an advance against future royalties on the book, which will have worldwide publication and be released next year.
"We got some incredible manuscripts but in the end, Mike's story was everything we were looking for: Fast, exciting, and well-written," said Otto Penzler, president and CEO of MysteriousPress.com.
The final determination on the winner was made by votes from MysteriousPress.com's publishing partners: Open Road Integrated Media, in North America and many countries around the world; Head of Zeus in the Commonwealth; Hayakawa Publishing (Japan, Singapore, and South Korea); Bonnier (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland); Dutch Media Books (Holland and Belgium), and Bastei Lubbe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Greece, and selected Eastern European countries).
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The shortlist has been unveiled for the £20,000 (about $24,460) T.S. Eliot Prize. The Bookseller reported that 2016 is the first year the prize has been administered by the T.S. Eliot Foundation, which took over the running of the award "following the closing of the Poetry Book Society, the charity which established the prize in 1993 and ran it for 23 years, in June." The winner will be announced January 16. This year's shortlisted titles are:
Void Studies by Rachael Boast
The Blind Road-Maker by Ian Duhig
Jackself by Jacob Polley
Say Something Back by Denise Riley
The Remedies by Katharine Towers
Interference Pattern by J.O. Morgan
Falling Awake by Alice Oswald
Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo
The Seasons of Cullen Church by Bernard O'Donoghue
Every Little Sound by Ruby Robinson