Cause UK has represented the UK’s oldest and most prestigious crime writing awards – the Crime Writers’ Association’s (CWA) Dagger Awards – for many years.
2025 saw the first Japanese author in its long history win a Dagger award: Akira Otani for The Night of Baba Yaga translated by Sam Bett.
The response from Japan was extraordinary.
Cause UK managed a deluge of media interest, helping organise five Japanese television news crews and multiple newspaper correspondents to attend the live London ceremony. Pre- and post-awards press conferences were arranged to accommodate the unexpected and intense interest.
Culturally, it’s difficult to think of many UK literary awards that would generate primetime breakfast news coverage across an entire nation – but this moment captured the imagination of the Japanese public.
You can read the report in The Asahi Shimbun here and The Japan news, here.
Japanese fiction has seen a significant rise in popularity in the UK in recent years, and Akira Otani’s win is likely to further fuel that growing interest.
Following the event, Akira Otani’s literary agent in Japan sent this note of appreciation to the CWA and Cause UK team:
“Thanks to your hard work, news of Akira Otani’s CWA Dagger win for crime fiction in translation has been widely reported on Japanese TV and online news this morning – the first time a Japanese author has won such a prestigious international award.
Thank you very much for all your efforts, especially managing so many Japanese media who rushed for last-minute access to the ceremony…
Congratulations on the success of the event!”
According to the media monitoring service Cision, the Japanese media coverage on the morning following the event reached a total audience of 54.1 million.
It followed on from huge media profile secured earlier in the year, when we announced the winner of the CWA Diamond Dagger (which is traditionally announced before the rest of the awards). 2025’s winner was Mick Herron.
Media achieved included bulletins on BBC Radio 4 Today, stories in The Guardian, The I Paper, Daily Express, and Euronews. Check out the Coverage Book here:
At Cause UK, we’re proud to have helped shine an international spotlight on the CWA and its authors, supporting a cultural moment that bridges storytelling across continents.
It builds on years of work with the CWA, 2024’s Dagger announcement in the press achieved over 200 stories in the morning we announced the winners.
Our media evaluation tool showed the top audience reach in ‘24 was for an article on MSN South Africa that linked to the Independent’s story, followed by the Guardian Online, Daily Mail Online, Evening Standard, Yahoo, AOL.
Securing online platforms (like Yahoo, MSN) took the story global to other countries (New Zealand, South Africa).
We also secured the Press Association which took the news the length and breadth of the British Isles, from the Belfast Telegraph, Doret Echo, Jersey Evening Post…
The evaluation tool (Cision) showed it had a total reach of 180.6M which is hard to fathom, but we live in the digital news age!