Omnivoracious

Caitlin R. Kiernan, Mort Castle, Joyce Carol Oates among 2013 Bram Stoker Award Winners in Horror

It was a frightfully fabulous weekend for the Horror Writers Association, which spent the last few days in New Orleans hosting the Bram Stoker Awards™ Weekend 2013, as well as the World Horror Convention. Amid the panels and art shows, readings, and signings, the gala presentation honored writers in 11 categories, including Novel, Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, Screenplay, and Poetry.

Caitlin R. Kiernan won best novel for The Drowning Girl, Joyce Carol Oates shared an award, and Mort Castle walked away with two haunted house trophies. Lifetime Achievement Awards went to Clive Barker and Robert R. McCammon.

The complete list of 2013 category nominees and winners were as follows:

Novel

Caitlin R. Kiernan -- The Drowning Girl (winner)

Benjamin Kane Ethridge -- Bottled Abyss

John Everson -- NightWhere

Bentley Little -- The Haunted

Joe McKinney -- Inheritance

 

First Novel

L.L. Soares -- Life Rage (winner)

Michael Boccacino -- Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling

Deborah Coates -- Wide Open

Charles Day -- The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief

Peter Dudar -- A Requiem for Dead Flies

Richard Gropp -- Bad Glass

 

Young Adult Novel

Jonathan Maberry -- Flesh & Bone (winner)

Libba Bray -- The Diviners

Barry Lyga -- I Hunt Killers

Michael McCarty -- I Kissed A Ghoul

Maggie Stiefvater -- The Raven Boys

Jeff Strand -- A Bad Day for Voodoo

 

Graphic Novel 

Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton -- Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (winner)

Cullen Bunn -- The Sixth Gun Volume 3: Bound

Terry Moore -- Rachel Rising Vol. 1: The Shadow of Death

Ravi Thornton -- The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone

Peter J. Wacks and Guy Anthony De Marco -- Behind These Eyes

 

Long Fiction

Gene O’Neill -- The Blue Heron (winner)

Kealan Patrick Burke -- Thirty Miles South of Dry County

Jack Ketchum and Lucky McGee -- I’m Not Sam

Joe McKinney and Michael McCarty -- Lost Girl of the Lake

Norman Prentiss -- The Fleshless Man

Short Fiction

Lucy Snyder -- "Magdala Amygdala" (winner)

Bruce Boston -- "Surrounded by the Mutant Rain Forest"

Joe McKinney -- "Bury My Heart at Marvin Gardens"

Weston Ochse -- "Righteous"

John Palisano -- "Available Light"

 

Screenplay

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard -- The Cabin in the Woods (winner)

Jane Goldman -- The Woman in Black

Sang Kyu Kim -- The Walking Dead, "Killer Within"

Tim Minear -- American Horror Story: Asylum, "Dark Cousin"

Gary Ross Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray -- The Hunger Games

 

 

Fiction Collection

Mort Castle -- New Moon on the Water (winner, tie)

Joyce Carol Oates -- Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories (winner, tie)

Jonathan Carroll -- Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories

Elizabeth Hand -- Errantry: Strange Stories

Glen Hirshberg -- The Janus Tree

 

Anthology

Mort Castle and Sam Weller -- Shadow Show (winner)

Eric J. Guignard -- Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations

Eric Miller -- Hell Comes to Hollywood

R.J. Cavender, Mark C.Scioneaux, and Robert S. Wilson -- Horror for Good: A Charitable Anthology

Stan Swanson -- Slices of Flesh

 

Non-Fiction

Lisa Morton -- Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween (winner)

Michael Collings -- Writing Darkness

Les Klinger -- The Annotated Sandman, Volume 1

Kim Paffenroth and John W. Morehead -- The Undead and Theology

Kendall R. Phillips -- Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film

 

Poetry

Marge Simon and Sandy DeLuca -- Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls (winner)

Linda Addison and Stephen M. Wilson -- Dark Duet

Bruce Boston and Gary William Crawford -- Notes from the Shadow City

Michael Collings -- A Verse to Horrors

Mary A. Turzillo -- Lovers & Killers

 

The 2012 Bram Stoker Award® winners: Top row (left to right): Mort Castle, L.L. Soares, Jerad Walters, Rocky Wood, Jonathan Maberry. Lower row/middle: Sam Weller, James Chambers, Lucy Snyder, Marge Simon, Robert McCammon, Caitlin R. Kiernan (seated), Charles Day, Lisa Morton
(Not pictured: Gene O'Neill, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Clive Barker)

2013 Edgar Award Winners Announced: "Live By Night" Gets Best Novel

"Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life--good or bad-- had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould."

So begins Live by Night, the latest novel by Dennis Lehane, acclaimed author of Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River, and the recipient of the 2013 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

The annual dinner and ceremony celebrating the year's best writing (according to the Mystery Writers of America) took place Thursday night at the Grand Hyatt in New York City, where attendees were "Dressed to Kill" and nominees vied for the prize in Best First Novel, Best Fact Crime, Best Short Story, Best Television Episode Teleplay, and more. 

The full list of winners and nominees can be found here, including:

Best Novel

• Live by Night by Dennis Lehane (*winner)
• The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins
• The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Potboiler by Jesse Kellerman
• Sunset by Al Lamanda
• All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley

Best First Novel

• The Expats by Chris Pavone (*winner)
• The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay
• Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman
• Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal
• The 500 by Matthew Quirk
• Black Fridays by Michael Sears

 

Best Paperback Original

• The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters (*winner)
• Complication by Isaac Adamson
• Whiplash River by Lou Berney
• Bloodland by Alan Glynn
• Blessed are the Dead by Malla Nunn

 

"The Orphan Master's Son" and More Pulitzer Prize Winners

After 2012's odd omission of a Fiction winner, this year's Pulitzer Prizes delivered on all fronts: Nonfiction to Gilbert King for Devil in the Grove, History to Fredrik Logevall for Embers of War, Biography to Tom Reiss for The Black Count, Poetry to Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap, Drama to Ayad Akhtar for Disgraced--and Fiction honors to Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master's Son, described by the judges as "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart."

In a piece here on why we'd picked Johnson's novel as our spotlight for the Best Book of the Month (over, I might add, John Green's phenomenal Fault in Our Stars) when it was released in January of last year, I shared how our team's obsession with this book in December 2011 took a strange turn when we heard that Kim Jon-il had died. The outpouring of news about and propaganda from North Korea felt like an alarming intrusion into reality of the fictional world we'd been compulsively descending into each night, a searing reminder "that the surreal, brutal universe Johnson evokes continues to unfold just across the Pacific."

As North Korea's new leader incites increasingly nervous debates about his true threat level, Johnson's novel feels all the more relevant and haunting. I keep finding myself drawn to Internet accounts from escapees and satellite images of the camps where a (roughly) estimated 3.5 million have so far been killed. No other modern nation is a more brutally constructed Orwellian fiction than the DPRK, and it's easy to see how Johnson became obsessed with questions about how it must be to live within this gulag of the mind. He wrote about this experience for Amazon Books:

I wondered what happened to personal desires when they came into conflict with a national story. Was it possible to retain a personal identity in such conditions, and under what circumstances would a person reveal his or her true nature? These mysteries--of subsumed selves, of hidden lives, of rewritten longings--are the fuel of novels, and I felt a powerful desire to help reveal what a dynastic dictatorship had forced these people to conceal.

Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the voids with research and imagination. Back home, I continued to read books and seek out personal accounts. Testimonies of gulag survivors like Kang Chol Hwan proved invaluable. But I found that most scholarship on the DPRK was dedicated to military, political and economic theory. Fewer were the books that focused directly on the people who daily endured such circumstances. Rarer were the narratives that tallied the personal cost of hidden emotions, abandoned relationships, forgotten identities. These stories I felt a personal duty to tell. Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn't make sense without writing his role as well.

If you want to understand North Koreans--and how they have been conditioned to think about Americans--start with The Orphan Master's Son.

See new and past Pultizer Prize winners at Amazon Books.

2013 IACP Award's Cookbook Winners

The International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) announced their 2013 awards last night. The winners included many of our favorite cookbooks of the past year, and many that are poised to double-medal with James Beard Awards, announced May 3. Browse highlights here or check out all 2013 IACP Award winners at Amazon. Congrats to all the winners and nominees!

Cookbook of the Year and International Winner
Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi: Powerhouse London restaurateurs born on opposite sides of Jerusalem came together for this cross-cultural culinary exploration--and celebration--of their home city.

American Winner
Hiroko’s American Kitchen: Cooking with Japanese Flavors by Hiroko Shimbo: A brilliantly easy method draws from one of six sauces in 125 recipes that put traditional Japanese dishes on the everyday American table.

Baking Winner
Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza by Ken Forkish: Portland's most beloved baker delivers a master class in exceptional artisan breadmaking at home.

Chefs and Restaurants Winner
Vietnamese Home Cooking by Charles Phan: In the words of Alice Waters, Phan's book "captures the very heart of Vietnamese food: fresh, pure, full of life, and vibrant with flavor." I heartily concur.

Culinary Travel Winner
Burma: Rivers of Flavor by Naomi Duguid: Once again, Duguid transcends our expectations of a traditional cookbook with a gorgeous, coffee table-worthy tome that invites readers to the feast of a new culture.

First Book: The Julia Child Award Winner
The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deborah Perelman: The lauded food blogger's debut effort wowed old and new fans with (as Deb says) "approachable recipes made with accessible ingredients that exceed your expectations."

Food and Beverage Reference Winner
Modernist Cuisine at Home by Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bilet: The inventive Cooking Lab champions of the Modernist culinary revolution infiltrate kitchens with home-scale bleeding-edge technology. Jaw-popping photos.

Food Photography and Styling Winner
Bouchon Bakery by Thomas Keller, Sebastien Rouxel, and Deborah Jones: An astonishingly accessible guide to making swoony Bouchon magic. Another beauty you may want to permanently display when it's not propped next to your mixer.

Literary Food Writing Winner
Yes, Chef: A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson: The renowned chef's life story takes us from a harsh childhood in Ethiopia to his grandmother's Swedish kitchen to his coming of age in the most celebrated (e.g., cutthroat) restaurants of Europe and New York, where he opened Red Rooster in Harlem. Told with disarming candor and humility, his journey feels miraculous and inevitable.

See all 2013 IACP Award winners at Amazon Books. --Mari Malcolm

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Brian Francis Slattery on Winning the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award

As announced at Norwescon in Seattle recently, Brian Francis Slattery has won the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award for his post-collapse novel Lost Everything. The award is presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction published in paperback original.

"Winning, as it turns out, is pretty humbling," Slattery told Omnivoracious, "especially given the quality of the other nominees' work. At the ceremony, the presenters had said that the judges felt they had a strong batch this year and were really enthusiastic about them. In the cases of all the other nominees, I can see why. As for what it means, I have no idea -- it'll be fun to figure out."

As for how Lost Everything fits into Slattery’s oeuvre, the author said although he was "recently accused ...of maturing, I wouldn’t go that far. However, in this third book, I did try to finish whatever it was I'd started in the first two. For a bunch of reasons, the result ended up being that Lost Everything is a lot darker than Spaceman Blues or Liberation; you could say I traded sarcasm and zaniness for creepiness, a swap I am, to this day, on the fence about, because I don't consider myself to be a particularly serious person."

Slattery acknowledges that not everyone will like Lost Everything, "because it's a sad book --'a sad book about climate change,’ as I've finally managed to start describing it. But the gamble was that getting serious would allow me to reach some place that staying light would not allow, and I'm delighted and grateful for the many readers who've told me how they connected with the book, and seen the hope written into the sadness, too."

Did he mean for his book to be predictive, in the traditional sense of science fiction as a "speculative" literature? "There's that great hoary old Ray Bradbury quote, [where he says that] 'people ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it.’ Nobody's really asked me to predict the future, but definitely Lost Everything was written with what Bradbury's describing here as a starting point."

About science fiction generally, Slattery noted that "There's been this long, interesting, and also vaguely painful conversation going on about how the borders between the genres have shifted in the past sixty years or so ... but at least from where I'm standing, it seems to me that right now science fiction is really vigorous and challenging and relevant and fun."

Slattery said that the kinds of SF novels he tends to read the most tend to be on the "zanier end of literary fiction -- [but that] I now seem to find labeled as science fiction. And in the past few years, it seems like more and more people are noticing something similar, which I think bodes well for everyone."

As for Philip K. Dicko, when we asked Slattery if he thought the iconic writer would have liked Lost Everything, he replied, "You know, when I think about PKD now, I always end up wondering something more like the opposite: If he were still around -- he'd be 85 now -- what would he be writing about? I wish I could read that. I feel like we need him now even more than we did then."

2012 Philip K. Dick Award Finalists Weigh in on PKD and the Competition

The nominees for the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award were announced recently. The award is presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction published in paperback original format.

Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot (Black Cat)

Harmony by Keith Brooke (Solaris)

Helix Wars by Eric Brown (Solaris)

The Not Yet by Moira Crone (UNO)

Fountain of Age by Nancy Kress (Small Beer)

LoveStar by Andri Snær Magnason (Seven Stories; translated by Victoria Cribb)

Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery (Tor)

The winner will be revealed tonight -- Friday, March 29 -- at Norwescon in Seattle. But before that happens, while the finalists are all in that space between, we thought we’d check in with them and get their thoughts on the award's namesake as well as their knowledge of the other nominees...

Amazon.com: Do you like Philip K. Dick's work, and can you share what's personal about being nominated for this particular award?

Ryan Boudinot: I have enjoyed Philip K Dick's work, yes. I read a bunch of his short stories in college, then in recent years discovered his excellent novel VALIS. I admire his imagination a great deal and have found the work of his I've read to be incredibly daring.

Keith Brooke: Yes, I'm a big admirer of his work. I have particularly fond memories of reading his novels in my teens. Books like a A Scanner, Darkly and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch made a huge impression: relentlessly readable but also a lot going on behind the scenes—I liked that I was reading something that stretched my mind as well as entertaining it. My YA novel Erased (published under the pen-name Nick Gifford) was a deliberate attempt to do a very Dickian thing: establish the reader's trust in a
world and then peel that away a layer at a time with repeated
rug-pull moments where the reader must reassess everything they thought they knew.

Eric Brown: I love Dick's work. (I wrote the Penguin Classic edition's Introduction to his fantastic The Man in the High Castle). I like the way he writes about real people; how his heroes aren't super-heroes but people like you and me, with problems, weaknesses, hopes and desires. He's an amazing writer even if you consider merely his characterization. 

On top of that there is what his novels are about: perceptions of reality and what it is to be human—and the fact that he was writing, particularly early in his career, when sci-fi wasn't about these things. He's a hero. The PKD award is nice in that it celebrates where he came from—the paperback original, the grunge end of the market. I like that.

Moira Crone: I do like Philip K Dick's work. I think he is one of the writers who will be read the most in the future, because explores the shifting understanding we have about reality now, in the Quantum era. He is before his time, he got it. The observer influences what he observes. We are catching up now with the questions he was asking. I would say the same about Ursula K. Le Guin, whose Left Hand of Darkness predicted the entire challenge of the fluidity of gender roles, fifty years before it was in the mainstream consciousness.

What is personal about this for me is that I have never written in this genre before and I had a lot of questions in the beginning about being accepted -- and many potential publishers were wary of this switch for me because they did not know how to market a sci-fi book. But I have found that sci-fi readers have embraced the book, and are incredibly enthusiastic and excited to talk to me about what I created and the worlds that other writers have engendered. 

I am a total "newbie" in this world, and yet I got this far. Another thing that is personal is that I am being read by an entirely new generation than before, and I really love the energy of my new readers; they make me want to write in the genre more, to go for the sequel. Writing this sort of book in this age is very enjoyable, because you can have so much interchange with your readers.

Nancy Kress: I first read Dick's The Man in the High Castle when it came out in 1962. I was fourteen, had just discovered sci-fi, and was baffled. This was such a strange book! I lacked sufficient knowledge of history to fully understand the changes that he was creating, but I was intrigued. And that is still the effect his work has on me: intrigue, occasional bafflement, and an enduring sense of the strange.

Andri Magnason: I would say that his early influence on me was mainly through films and ideas floating around and discussed by friends. My early influence was by reading too much folklore, poetry and mythology while reading science and trying med school. Other writers include Karel Capek, Bulgakov, Calvino, Borges, Vonnegut and Orwell, and Icelandic writers and poets. Brautigan had quite an influence on LoveStar. I was kind of imagining a world before [his novel] In Watermelon Sugar when I started writing, but that changed so much that I would not call it a prequel.

The nomination is very important, almost like an Olympic gold to me. I was a bit worried, looking over the endless pile of sci-fi, wondering what the real geeks would say about my book. I was not quite following the formula and genre rules that seemed to be dominating the scene. I wondered if my book lacked vampires or zombies or six volumes. I was also wondering if someone had already written my book without my knowledge. 

Most importantly is that now I know that you can write some kind of sci-fi in a 1,000-year-old Viking language only spoken by 300,000 people and still be taken seriously and manage to connect to an audience in the large world (with the help of Vicky, my great translator of course).

Amazon.com: If you don't win, who do you hope does win?

Ryan Boudinot: I feel it's important to make the distinction that "I" have not been nominated for the award. My novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife has. I'll be genuinely happy for the author of whatever book is granted this award.

Keith Brooke: Oh, Eric Brown, without a doubt. We've been friends for years, and we've written a bunch of stories together (a new edition of our collaborative collection, Parallax View, is just out in paperback and e-book formats). Beyond the friendship, though, he's a superb writer and really deserves the attention.

Eric Brown: I hope Keith Brooke wins, period. His novel alt.human [as it's titled in the U.K.] -- Harmony in the States -- is better than my Helix Wars, and Keith deserves the award. He's a good friend and I was privileged to be among the first readers of the manuscript. If neither of us wins, then I hope Nancy Kress does. I haven't actually read her book, but I've read quite a bit of her work and admire it tremendously.

Moira Crone: Of course I would want to win. I won't say who I like the best—I have only read about half the other nominees. I think that LoveStar and Lost Everything have very fine writing in them and I have found them wonderful. But I have not read Blueprints, yet, and some of the others. The range is exciting and all of them seem completely accessible to someone like me, who has read in sci fi but certainly not the whole genre. 

Nancy Kress: I won't say who I think should win the award because I haven't read all the nominees, so it wouldn't be fair.

Andri Magnason: I have been reading Blueprints of the Afterlife the recent weeks and it is a very inspiring great book, kind of the type of books I tend to seek and find very rarely. It seems like the jury is open to experimental things and I appreciate that. So, I am quite honored to be nominated along with that book. I am currently catching up on the other books, as I have just finished a deadline for my next book.

Amazon.com: Can you give us a favorite teaser of a sentence from your nominated novel?

Ryan Boudinot: "The world was full of precious garbage."

Keith Brooke: "I opened my mouth to speak, to ask him what was going on, for I was suddenly sure that he understood far more than me, but then Pennysway began to unhappen."

Eric Brown: "After the row with Maria, which left him feeling sick and wishing he could retroactively edit his words, Ellis strapped himself into the shuttle’s couch and prepared to take off from Carrelliville spaceport."

Moira Crone: "Now dear boy, so far, you have been very brave."

Nancy Kress: My nominated work is a collection of stories. This opening paragraph is from the eponymous story: "I had her in a ring. In those days you carried around pieces of a person. Not like today."

Andri Magnason: From the manifesto of LoveStar, the CEO of the LoveStar corporation..."To be content with having had an idea is like being content with having once had an orgasm, being content with having once eaten or drunk."

Children's Choice Book Awards: The Finalists

The Children's Choice Book Awards are a relatively new, but have a unique method of choosing the winners--the votes of children.  Educators, librarians, and classrooms full of kids can all be involved--reading the finalist books and submitting a vote for their favorite books in each grade level category.  The 2013 lists have a fantastic line-up of titles, including some of my favorites from 2012 Best Books of the Month and Year.  The awards will be announced at a gala event on May 13th, kicking off Children's Book Week and I can't wait to see who wins.  Have you ever voted for the CCBAs before?  If you haven't, these finalists are a good reason to start:

 Kindergarten - Second Grade

• Big Mean Mike by Michelle Knudsen
• The Duckling Gets a Cookie!? by Mo Willems
• I'll Save You Bobo! by Eileen Rosenthal
• Nighttime Ninja by Barbara DaCosta
• Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons by Eric Litwin

Grades 3-4

• Bad Kitty for President by Nick Bruel
• Get the Scoop on Animal Poop by Dawn Cusick
• Homer by Shelley Rotner
• National Geographic Kids Just Joking: 300 Hilarious Jokes, Tricky Tongue Twisters, and Ridiculous Riddles by National Geographic Kids
• Pluto Visits Earth! by Steve Metzger

Grades 5-6

• Dork Diaries 4: Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess by Rachel Renee Russell
• Liar & Spy by Rebecca Stead
• Pickle: The (Formerly) Anonymous Prank Club of Fountain Point Middle School by Kim Baker
• Rebel McKenzie by Candice Ransom
• Stickman Odyssey, Book 2: The Wrath of Zozimos by Christopher Ford

 

Announcing the Winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2013

Last May, in his Best of the Month review for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, our own Neal Thompson said author Ben Fountain was "a writer worth every accolade about to come his way," and appears that that prediction has come true. In addition to being a finalist in the National Book Awards, last night Fountain took home the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards for Fiction.

Among the other big winners were Andrew Solomon, who won the Nonfiction category for Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Robert A. Caro in the Biography category for The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and D.A. Powell for his poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.

Check out all the winners, as well as all the finalists.

YA Wednesday: 2013 Printz Award

I don't know about the rest of you, but this year's Michael L. Printz picks were a bit of a surprise to me.  Don't get me wrong--the winner, In Darkness by Nick Lake, is a book to rave about (one reviewer even compared it to The Wire) and I'm really happy for the author to receive this show of book love. Lake's raw narrative tells a story of brutality and courage, and in his hands a Haitian boy trapped in the wreckage of an earthquake captures universal experiences of teens (or adults, for that matter), be it love, loss, or hope against all odds. Winning the Printz award will hopefully bring In Darkness the attention and readership it deserves.

I was also thrilled to see a couple of my favorites of last year make the Honor list, including Code Name Verity and Dodger--my surprise came from the omission of a couple books that I was almost certain would make the cut and didn't (I'm thinking of Every Day and The Fault in Our Stars). 

What books on the list did you love?  Any you would have included in your own Printz line-up?

2013 Printz Winner and Honor books:

• In Darkness by Nick Lake--Winner!
• Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein--Honor
• Dodger by Terry Pratchett--Honor
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe--Honor
• The White Bicycle by Beverley Brenna--Honor

2013 Children's Book Award Winners

Today the American Library Association announced the winners of the biggest children's book awards of the year at a ceremony here in Seattle.  It was really exciting to be in the audience with publishers, authors, librarians and booksellers as we all waited anxiously to see if any of our favorites made the list and each announcement was greeted by a "love bomb" of applause.

2013 is the 75th anniversary of one of the most prestigious awards, the Randolph Caldecott award for illustration and I could not have been more thrilled when they announced that This Is Not My Hat, my own number one pick for the Best Picture Book of 2012, was the winner. Author and illustrator Jon Klassen also took home a second win, a Caldecott Honor for his illustration of Extra Yarn. 

The One and Only Ivan took home the Newbery Medal for children's literature and is so deserving of the prize.  Ivan made our Best Middle Grade Books of 2012 list with its touching narrative and memorable characters--it is right at home with other classic animal stories of friendship and courage.

Here is the full list of the winners and honor books for 2013's Caldecott and Newbery Medals. You can see more 2013 Children's Book award winners here.

Randolph Caldecott Medal: This year there were an astonishing four Honor books in addition to the winner

• This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen - Winner!
• Extra Yarn written by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen - Honor
• One Cool Friend written by Toni Buzzeo, illustrated by David Small - Honor
• Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger - Honor
• Sleep Like a Tiger written by Mary Loque, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski - Honor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Newbery Medal:

• The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate - Winner!
• Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage -Honor
• Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin - Honor
• Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz - Honor