Credit: Europa Editions
Blake Friedmann is delighted to announce that Karin Brynard’s WEEPING WATERS has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger Award 2019. The prize recognises crime novels not originally written in English but translated for UK publication. WEEPING WATERS was translated by Karin’s agent Isobel Dixon along with Maya Fowler, and is published in the UK and US by Europa Editions and in Italy by E/O.
The CWA Award winners will be announced at an award ceremony at the Grange City Hotel in London on 24 October 2019. See more information on the International Dagger shortlist here.
In WEEPING WATERS, Inspector Albertus Beeslaar is a traumatized cop who has abandoned tough city policing and a broken relationship in Johannesburg for a backwater post on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. But his dream of rural peace is soon shattered by the repeated attacks of a brutally efficient crime syndicate, as he struggles to train and connect with rookie local cops, Ghaap and Pyl, who resent his brusqueness and his old-school ways.
The original Afrikaans edition was published by Human & Rousseau as PLAASMOORD and won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Fiction and the M-Net Literature Award, Film Category. Film and TV rights in the Albertus Beeslaar series are optioned to Three River Studios. Karin has completed two more novels in the series, OUR FATHERS and HOMELAND, published in Afrikaans and English in South Africa by Penguin Books. Formerly a political and investigative journalist, Karin Brynard is now one of South Africa’s most successful authors, a bestseller in her home country, with her work translated in Dutch, French, German and Italian.
Praise for Karin Brynard
‘Karin Brynard has established herself as one of a handful of great thriller writers in South Africa. The fact that she has won many literary awards attests to the depth and staying power of her work. … Brynard’s observations of people are subtle and deep; she reads the small things.’ – Jane Rosenthal, Mail & Guardian
'The queen of South African crime fiction is Karin Brynard... Her journalism background is tangible in the way she fills out her characters and storylines with relevant factual details in a subtle yet effective way.’ — Dey There, 12 South African Crime Writers to Add to Your Reading List
Praise for WEEPING WATERS
'Brooding. Riveting. Brilliant.' — Deon Meyer
‘WEEPING WATERS is brimming with authenticity. A lucent tale of farm murder and rural society in the vice of social pressures, with the translation beautifully done by Maya Fowler and Isobel Dixon.’ – William Saunderson-Meyer, Sunday Times, 2014 Best Reads
‘Karin Brynard's WEEPING WATERS is that rare crime fiction novel that transcends the genre. The heir apparent to J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE, Brynard's book, set in South Africa, unfurls over the reader with glorious, sensuous prose in a tremendous translation. We see, feel, and smell the locations and are transported to another world. The many characters are three-dimensional and spring to life with crackling dialogue that has the ring of verisimilitude. Though a gripping whodunnit, WEEPING WATERS is geologically layered with complex interpersonal relationships, the backdrop of South Africa's fraught post-Apartheid politics, and a main character in Inspector Beeslaar – world-weary, fiercely independent – who anchors the book, and through whom Brynard paints a country's history, past and present, with the accretion of nuanced details. Built for a blockbuster miniseries. The best novel I've read all year.’ — Rex Pickett, author of SIDEWAYS