Orcrime 2012 - Crime Fiction Competition

This year Orkney will add a new festival to its calendar when the first Orkney crime writing festival - Orcrime 2012 - will run from October 11-13. Organised by Orkney Library and Archive and sponsored by the Orcadian Bookshop the festival will feature appearances from renowned crime novelists Lin Anderson, Ann Cleeves and Denise Mina, as well as crime historian and true crime author Paul Harrison, and Orkney storyteller Tom Muir.

We will bring you more details of the events nearer to the time but something you need to know about now is the chance to enter the first Orkney Crime Fiction Short Story Competition!

The competition will form part of  Orcrime 2012 and is being run by Orkney Library and Archive and the George Mackay Brown Fellowship.

Library assistant Stewart Bain explains the motivation behind the new competition: “Crime fiction has always been popular with our readers, but other than Allan Guthrie and J Storer Clouston, there haven’t been many Orcadian authors known for writing crime fiction. We hope this competition might change that and that one day we might be lending books by the winning author.”

Lucy Gibbon, of the George Mackay Brown Fellowship, is also hoping the competition will tap into the rich vein of creative writing talent in the islands:  “We are very pleased to launch this competition in partnership with the Orkney Library and Archive. We hope that it will encourage people to put pen to paper and come up with fresh angles on the theme of crime.”

The competition is open to anyone over the age of 16 and the judges are looking for a fictional story of no more than 2000 words which has not been published before. There is an entry fee of £2 per story.

A shortlist of five entries will be decided by a panel of local judges, representing the George Mackay Brown Fellowship, the Orkney Library and Archive, and Living Orkney, from which the winners will be chosen by award winning crime writer Ann Cleeves, author of the popular Shetland Quartet. There are cash prizes of £100, £50 and £25 for the top three entries and the first prize winner will have their story published in a future edition of Living Orkney magazine.

The closing date for entries is 20th September  and the winner will be announced during the Orcrime Festival. For more information on how to enter you can download the entry guidelines as a pdf.