Amanda Coplin Wins Top Fiction Award and Cheryl Strayed Takes Top
Nonfiction Honors
Company Website:
http://www.BN.com
NEW YORK -- (Business Wire)
Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of
content, digital media and educational products, today announced that
Amanda Coplin’s novel, The Orchardist (HarperCollins), and Cheryl
Strayed’s Wild (Alfred A. Knopf) have been named the winners of
the 2012 Discover Awards for Fiction and Nonfiction, respectively. Each
writer was awarded a cash prize of $10,000 and a full year of marketing
and merchandising support from the Company.
Second-place winners were Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles
(Random House) for Fiction and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful
Forevers (Random House) for Nonfiction. Each award carries a $5,000
prize. Third place was awarded to The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
(Reagan Arthur Books/Little Brown) for Fiction and Full Body Burden
by Kristen Iversen (Crown Publishing Group) for Nonfiction. Each
received a $2,500 prize. The awards were presented this afternoon at a
private ceremony in New York.
The Discover Great New Writers Awards are presented annually in
recognition of one important quality: literary excellence. In the works
of the six finalists, our literary jurists discovered the same
remarkable talent our Discover readers identified and believe is an
indication of even greater things to come.
The Jurists
Two panels of distinguished literary judges selected the winners and
finalists. Serving as this year’s Fiction judges were Lan Samantha
Chang, director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and author of three
books, including the 1998 Discover selection Hunger and, most
recently, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost; Alan Cheuse,
author of several books, including The Light Possessed, a 1990
Discover selection, and a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things
Considered; and Karl Marlantes, author of the national
bestsellers Matterhorn (a 2010 Discover selection) and What It
Is Like to Go to War.
This year’s Nonfiction judges were Susan Cheever, author of nine
works of nonfiction, including Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography
and five novels; Wendy McClure, author of the 2011 Discover
selection The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little
House on the Prairie, among other books; and Touré, co-host
of MSNBC’s The Cycle and author of four books, among them The
Portable Promised Land, a 2002 Discover selection, and most
recently, I Will Die 4 U: How Prince Became an Icon.
The Discover Awards
The Discover Great New Writers program (www.bn.com/discover)
was established in 1990 to highlight works of exceptional literary
quality that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book
marketplace. This year’s selections featured the works of 53 new and
previously underappreciated writers. Submissions to the program are read
and discussed by a group of Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection
for the program’s seasonal promotions.
Past winners of the annual Discover Great New Writers Award include
Scott O’Connor for Untouchable and Michael Levy for Kosher
Chinese (both 2011), David Sheff for Beautiful Boy (2008),
Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (2007), Ben Fountain for
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006), Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts
of No Nation (2005), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals
(2004), Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003), Dina Temple-Ralston for A
Death in Texas (2002), Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers
(2001), Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000),
Carrie Brown for Rose’s Garden (1998), Elizabeth McCracken for The
Giant’s House (1996), Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker
(1995), and David Guterson for Snow Falling on Cedars (1994).
Books by the winners, finalists and judges can be purchased at any
Barnes & Noble store, online at Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com)
or instantly downloaded on any NOOK® reader or tablet. Additional
information about the 2012 Discover Awards winners and judges can be
found at www.bn.com/discover.
About Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) is a Fortune 500 company and the leading
retailer of content, digital media and educational products. The company
operates 677 Barnes & Noble bookstores in 50 states, and one of the
Web’s largest e-commerce sites, BN.com (www.bn.com).
Its NOOK Media LLC subsidiary is a leader in the emerging digital
reading and digital education markets. The NOOK digital business offers
award-winning NOOK® products and an expansive collection of digital
reading and entertainment content through the NOOK Store™ (www.nook.com),
while Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC operates 678 bookstores
serving over 4.6 million students and faculty members at colleges and
universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is proud to be
named a J.D. Power and Associates 2012 Customer Service Champion and is
only one of 50 U.S. companies so named. Barnes & Noble.com is ranked the
number one online retailer in customer satisfaction in the book, music
and video category and a Top 10 online retailer overall in customer
satisfaction according to ForeSee E-Retail Satisfaction Index (Spring
Top 100 Edition).
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Contacts:
Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Mary Ellen Keating, 212-633-3323
Corporate
Communications
mkeating@bn.com
or
Carolyn
J. Brown, 212-633-4062
Corporate Communications
cbrown@bn.com
Source: Barnes & Noble, Inc.