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The Crime Writers Association of Australia was set up in the mid 1990s to promote and encourage Australian crimewriting through the establishment of the Ned Kelly Awards. The 'annual Neddies' have subsequently become an eagerly anticipated fixture on the Australian literary scene.
As legend has it, the Ned Kelly Awards and the Crime Writers Association of Australia were the brain child of various writers, critics, acedemics and booksellers given to meeting over luncheon in Sydney's Chinatown from time to time.
This was the mid 1990s and the Australian crime writing canon had exploded. Readers were supportive, clamouring for stories that reflected our side of the world and the output from writers established and new, was the most exciting and stimulating development in the popular reading realm since Peter Corris ignited the scene in the early 1980s.
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