News Archive

LA Times Book Award

Simon Lewis’s exceptional debut crime thriller, Bad Traffic has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award. Besides being short listed for the World Book Day Spread the Word promotion, Bad Traffic has been nominated for this highly prestigious US/Crime thriller prize. Simon is the only Welsh or, indeed, British author on the shortlist. 

Simon said:  “The book began life as a response to two real life crimes: the death by suffocation of more than fifty illegal Chinese immigrants in a lorry container, and the drowning of the cockle pickers on Morecombe Bay… The book also offered the interesting opportunity to write about my own country as it might be seen through alien eyes, as a place of threat and terror, a mysterious and frightening unknown.”

"Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis is a fast-paced, refreshingly different thriller that owes much of its success to its central character…The personality of Ding Ming, an illegal immigrant with a rudimentary knowledge of the language, is especially well drawn: confused, terrified and frantically worrying about his wife, from whom he has been separated…A brutally authentic portrayal of the cruelty and greed behind the exploitation of desperate people."
Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph

"Lewis’ aim was to write a book that was “fast-paced and pulpy, with plenty of action”. He has certainly succeeded, but there’s more besides – dark comedy, sensitive characterisation and an incisive rendering of the desperation felt by beleaguered strangers in a foreign land." 
Laura Wilson, Guardian

"So much crime fiction set in China has appeared recently that this once-exotic setting has almost become a cliché. Simon Lewis reverses the usual scenario, giving us a detective from China hunting his quarry in Britian, encountering the Chinese inhabitants of these isles along the way…Can a writer make a good book out of moral indignation? Lewis does a brilliant job, creating a fast moving narrative out of Inspector Jian’s search for his missing daughter."
Jane Jakeman, The Independent (The Tuesday Book choice).

Simon is currently working on many disparate projects including a sequel to Bad Traffic, a book for older child readers; a novel set in Wales and a screenplay.

For more details about Simon’s work clik here: www.simonlewiswriter.com