Twitter was abuzz yesterday with news of the 2012 MWA Edgar Award Nominations. For those who don’t know (I didn’t) MWA stands for Mystery Writers of America, and the award is named in honour of one of the best-known fathers of crime, Edgar Allan Poe.

The entire list of nominations is available on Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare blog. As a fan of international crime fiction, I was particularly pleased to see two translated novels in the ‘Best Novel’ category: The Devotion of Suspect X, a Japanese novel by Keigo Higashino and 1222 by the Norwegian author Anne Holt.

Both novels have been loitering in my TBR pile and I’m hoping that their nomination for this prestigious prize is the encouragement I need to finally get reading.