Barnes & Noble awarded its 24th annual Discover Great New Writers Awards at a ceremony in New York City on March 4. Evie Wyld took home the fiction award for her novel, All the Birds, Singing (Pantheon); and Bryce Andrews won for nonfiction for his memoir Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (Atria). Each writer took home a $10,000 prize, as well as a year of marketing and merchandising support from B&N.
Molly Antopol's The UnAmericans (Norton) was the second-place fiction winner, and Arna Bontemps Hemenway for Elegy on Kinderklavier (Sarabande Books) took third.
For nonfiction, Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (Norton) was the runner-up, and Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (Grove/Atlantic) by Will Harlan was the third-place winner. Second and third place finalists each received $5,000 and $2,5000, respectively, in addition to the year of promotional support from the bookseller.
The fiction judges this year included Chris Adrian, Anne Cherian, and Sheri Holman. Malcolm Jones, Pagan Kennedy, and Héctor Tobar made up the nonfiction panel of judges.
The Discover Program, which turns 25 this year, recognizes great fiction and nonfiction from authors at the starts of their careers.
