David L. Goodis Award - Aurélien Masson
Aurélien Masson was born in 1975 and quit academia at the age of twenty-four to take a trip around the world. After three years as an editorial assistant for la Serie Noire at Gallimard, one of France’s leading publishing companies, he became the series director. Masson is currently an editor at Les Arènes.
After studying history and sociology in Paris, Aurélien Masson spent a sabbatical year in Southeast Asia and America. He entered the English reader at Gallimard editions with Patrick Raynal, then director of the ``Black Series``.
In the fall of 2002, he was hired by Antoine Gallimard as a publisher alongside the latter. After the negotiated departure of Patrick Raynal, two years before his retirement, and his departure from Fayard, Aurélien Masson is responsible for succeeding him as director of the “black series”. With authors like Antoine Chainas, Doa, Frédéric Jaccaud and Benoît Minville, he contributed to the French Fluar revival in the 2000s.
In 2015, he participated in the editorial staff of the book was the story of the black series 1945-2015 (collective work, Gallimard, (ISBN 978-2-07-010709-4) For the 70th anniversary of the black series).
In July 2017, he left the black series and left for the arenas create the new “Equinox” collection.
Jay & Deen Kogan Award - Charles Ardai and Stona Fitch
Charles Ardai is an American entrepreneur, businessperson, and writer of award winning crime fiction and mysteries. He is founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, a line of pulp-style paperback crime novels. He is also an early employee of D. E. Shaw & Co. and remains a managing director of the firm. He was the former chairman of Schrödinger, Inc.
Stona Fitch founded the Concord Free Press, a revolutionary publishing house that publishes and distributes original novels throughout the world, asking only that readers make a voluntary donation to a charity or person in need. The CFP books have inspired more than $1.3 million in generosity.
Under the pseudonym Richard Aleas — an anagram of his own name — Charles Ardai writes crime fiction, too. His novels Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence detail the exploits of private investigator John Blake.
Anne Freidberg Award - Barry Gifford
Barry Gifford is an American author, poet, and screenwriter known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and prose influenced by film noir and Beat Generation writers.
Gifford is best known for his series of novels about Sailor and Lula, two star-crossed protagonists on a perpetual road trip. Published in seven novels between 1990 and 2015, the Sailor and Lula series is described by professor Andrei Codrescu as written in ``a great comic realist`` style that explores ``an unmistakably American universe populated by a huge and lovable humanity propelled on a tragic river of excess energy.`` The first book of the series, Wild at Heart, was adapted by director David Lynch for the 1990 film of the same title. Gifford went on to write the original screenplay for Lost Highway (1997) with Lynch. Perdita Durango, the third book in the Sailor and Lula series, was adapted into a 1997 film by Alex de la Iglesia with a script co-written by Gifford. His most recent book, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonado, published by Seven Stories Press in 2020, is a Western noir novella that traces the struggle of the first integrated Native American tribe to establish themselves on the North American continent.
