Series Mania, Europe’s biggest TV festival and forum, has revealed its impressive 2024 main competition lineup, which includes Øystein Karlsen’s So Long, Marianne. The original series, created by Karlsen, stars Alex Wolff and Thea Sofie Loch Næss and tells the legendary love story of Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen, and his muse Marianne Ihlen.

So Long, Marianne will have its world premiere at the festival, which takes place in Lille, France, 15-22 March.

2024’s winner of the Finnish Whodunnit Society’s Honorary Award for foreign crime fiction is none other than Jørn Lier Horst. An annual honorary award, the winner is selected by the Board of the Whodunnit Society in consultation with the editor-in-chief of the magazine Ruumiin kulttuuri (Body Culture). More than twenty international authors – among them Colin Dexter, Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, Håkan Nesser, Henning Mankell, Fred Vargas, Keigo Higashino, and Pierre Lemaitre – have received the award since 1993.

The jury motivates their choice thusly:

“Norwegian Jørn Lier Horst is known to crime and suspense fiction fans for his police novel series William Wisting. Because of his police background, the Wisting books have a realistic portrayal of police investigations. In the Wisting series, Horst successfully combines past and present. His style is clear and recognizable, with philosophical reflections on the nature of evil and a fast-paced plot that draws the reader in. The characters are easy to get attached to and to care about.

The Finnish Whodunnit Society would like to use this recognition to draw attention to Horst’s other side as a writer and to thank him for this as well. Horst has written dozens of children’s and young adult detective stories, which have also been translated into Finnish. The children’s detective series Detective Agency No. 2 /…/ and the youth detective series Clue are very popular, for example in the children’s sections of Finnish libraries.”

Established by Swedish magazine QX in 1999, the QX Awards are an annual event celebrating and awarding LGBT achievements. Jonas Gardell is the proud winner of the 2024 Novel of the Year award, which he receives for his latest title, Sissy.

The voting is now open for this year’s Norwegian Storytel Awards, which pay particular respect to the audio book narrators working on the nominated titles.

Among those whose works have been nominated in the category Crime & Suspense are Anders de la Motte with The Mountain King, Anders Roslund with Sweet Dreams, Jørn Lier Horst with The Traitor, Jo Nesbø with Killing Moon, and Lars Kepler with The Spider.

Thomas Seltzer’s American Karmageddon is nominated in the category Narrated by Author.

The twenty-sixth Detective Agency No. 2 title, Operation Eeny Meeny, has just been published in Norway. This time around Detective Agency No. 2 is up against their biggest task so far, with no less than seven suspects. The snow is melting in Riverton, and as it does a pile of mysterious things are uncovered beneath a drift: a balaclava, a pair of gloves, a few pieces of wood, and a crowbar. What has happened? Detective Agency No. 2 soon comes across traces of a crime with many suspects. Can they find out who is behind it all?

The paperback edition of Jo Nesbø’s Killing Moon is No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list for the second consecutive week.

The official trailer for Daniel Espinosa’s new feature film, Madame Luna, has been released.

Inspired by true events, Madame Luna is a thrilling drama about an Eritrean refugee who is washed ashore in Libya, and with time becomes one of the most notorious human smugglers with deep ties to the Italian Mafia.

The film is written by Maurizio Braucci, Suha Arraf and Espinosa, and produced by David Herdies for Momento Film.