Barnes and Noble hosted a ceremony today in New York where they announced the winners of this year’s Discover Great New Writers Award. The award, first presented in 1990 and now in its 22nd year, is bestowed on new and undiscovered authors whose work has great literary merit.
This year’s fiction category winner is Amanda Coplin for The Orchardist, while the non-fiction winner was Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, published by HarperCollins and Alfred A. Knopf, respectively. Second and third place honorees in the fiction category were Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles and The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey; the non-fiction second and third place winners were Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen.
In addition to the monetary awards presented to each of the top three honorees in both fiction and non-fiction, these titles, along with other mentionable works, will be featured in promotions from Barnes and Noble. The goal of the award and the inclusion in the honor is to enable readers to more readily find these works that may otherwise have been lost among the many titles sold by the online retailer, especially as more entities are working to address the obstacles to book discovery.
This award parallels the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, which are open to a decidedly more self-published pool of authors. The ABNA awards have finished the first-round cuts and will continue through different stages until the final presentation in late spring.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.