Bhadreshwar wins Little Brown’s UEA Crime Fiction Award for ‘truly remarkable’ novel

Nina Bhadreshwar has won the 2022 Little, Brown UEA Crime Fiction Award with her debut novel, The Day of the Roaring.

The annual award is given to the best book by a graduating student from UEA’s Creative Writing Crime Fiction MA, with previous winners including Femi Yayode (Lightseekers; published by Raven) and Emma Styles (No Country for Girls; Sphere).

Bhadreshwar wins the £3,000 prize, which was chaired by Sphere Fiction publishing director Ed Wood and judged by a diverse panel of Little, Brown staff. The runner up, Kat Latham, was highly commended for her novel No Man’s Land.

Wood said: “We were beyond impressed by The Day of the Roaring, it’s a truly remarkable first novel – debuts simply don’t come better. It’s a beautifully conceived novel that, while recognisably sitting within regional procedural, also feels utterly fresh and modern. Frankly, we were blown away.”

On winning the award, Bhadreshwar said: “I know how critical the publishing industry is about police procedural fiction, let alone one written by a writer of colour, so winning this award is a massive honour. To be read would have been sufficient; to be read and heard hits on another level.”

Wood added that the highly commended title, an upmarket novel set in the American Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, “has probably the strongest narrative voice of any novel we have yet seen in the award – not just this year”.