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Barnaby Hill wins Little, Brown UEA Crime Award 2025
Babydoll by Barnaby Hill has been announced as the winner of the Little, Brown UEA Crime Award 2025.
The £3,000 prize is awarded annually to the best manuscript by graduating students on the University of East Anglia MA in Creative Writing Crime Fiction. It is judged by editors from Little, Brown imprint Sphere and chaired by Sphere editorial director Cal Kenny.
Babydoll is a procedural crime novel that takes place in 1974 Edinburgh. "Once a rising star in the City Police, Topher McGuire is now a pariah – struck from the force for the crime of homosexuality," the synopsis says. "Reduced to making a living as a private eye, Topher spends the days shadowing cheating husbands for suspicious housewives.
"But in the quiet, precarious hours of night, Topher becomes Dusty – the woman she truly is. It’s a dangerous existence, characterised by casual brutality and the constant threat of violence. Yet every dawn Dusty reaches is a small act of rebellion."
The blurb continues: "Now a new terror stalks the city: a killer carving a path through Edinburgh’s gay community. With no real leads and victims mounting, Topher’s former partner, Iain Campbell, drags him reluctantly back into the fold – as the force’s guide through Scotland’s clandestine gay underworld. But for Topher, this isn’t just another case. It’s a reckoning. And its outcome means the difference between life and death."
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Babydoll was selected from a shortlist of four titles that also included Dickie by Helen Gray, The Lucas Lie by Liz Isaacs and Man Slaughter by Helena Keys.
"Babydoll is a darkly textured, highly sophisticated thriller that proves why crime fiction is an evergreen lens through which to interrogate the world," Kenny said. "Barnaby Hill weaves a thrilling, tightly plotted procedural while simultaneously exploring important themes of male violence, transphobia and the systemic abuse of power.
"Hill evokes 1970s Edinburgh in outstanding prose, but his perspective as a writer couldn’t be more contemporary; Babydoll is a worthy winner from an incredibly strong cohort of submissions."
Hill added: "It’s a joy that a story where queerness – in its vibrant, vicious realities – takes centre stage and can be given this kind of recognition. Babydoll wouldn’t be the novel she is without my coursemates’ insight and friendship, nor my tutors’ unwavering support. I am beyond thrilled."
Previous winners of the award include Femi Kayode, Rebecca Hannigan and Emma Styles.
