Griffiths wins Listening Books' Members Choice Award

Elly Griffiths’ Bleeding Heart Yard (Quercus) has won the Listening Books Members Choice Award 2023.

Griffiths’ novel was selected from a shortlist of 20 which included Barbara Kingsolver’s Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Demon Copperhead (Faber), Adam Kay’s Undoctored (Orion) and R F Kuang’s Babel (HarperVoyager). The winner was selected by Listening Books’ members with the shortlist consisting of titles published last year which recorded the highest number of listens from the members. 

"I’m very honoured to win the Listening Books Members’ Choice Award," said Griffiths. "Audiobooks are a wonderful thing in themselves and that is partly, if not entirely due to the brilliance of the narrators. So, I have to share this award with the narrators of Bleeding Heart Yard: Candida Gubbins, Jane Collingwood and Nina Wadia.”

Bleeding Heart Yard follows DS Cassie Fitzgerald who helped kill a fellow pupil with her friends when they were at school. Thirty years later, Cassie has suppressed the memory, but when she attends a school reunion and an ex-pupil is found dead, Cassie must investigate. 

Last year’s prize was awarded to Ben Aaronovitch for Amongst Our Weapons (Orion), narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, with Robert Thorogood winning in the prize’s first year for The Marlow Murder Club (HarperCollins).

Listening Books’ members have an illness, disability, learning difficulty or mental health condition which makes reading print difficult or impossible. The charity helps over 115,000 children and adults.