Caribbean crime thriller wins inaugural prize for only BAME writers

The Jhalak prize, set up to address UK publishing’s long lack of diversity, goes to Jacob Ross’s crime novel The Bone Readers

The inaugural Jhalak prize for black, Asian and minority ethnic writers (BAME) has been won by Jacob Ross with his “thrilling, visceral and meditative, and always cinematic” crime novel The Bone Readers.

Ross’s winning book shadows Digger, a plainclothes officer working in a rogue police force on the small Caribbean island of Camaho, who can read bones under LED lights. It is the first in a quartet, while also being the British Grenadian writer’s first foray into crime writing: Ross is the author of two short story collections and the acclaimed 2009 novel Pynter Bender.

Related: The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross review – into a Caribbean island’s sordid underbelly

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