Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), one of the nation’s largest booksellers and the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced the six finalists for its prestigious 2013 Discover Great New Writers Awards.  The winners in each category, fiction and nonfiction, receive a $10,000 prize and a full year of additional promotion from Barnes & Noble.  Second-place finalists receive $5,000, and third-place finalists $2,500.  The finalists are:
 
Fiction:

  • NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names (Little, Brown & Co.) 
  • Rebecca Lee, Bobcat & Other Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
  • Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth)

Nonfiction:

  • Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (Alfred A. Knopf)
  • Domenica Ruta, With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau)
  • Justin St. Germain, Son of a Gun (Random House)

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, March 5, at a private awards ceremony.  The Discover Awards honor the best works featured the previous calendar year in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program.

Books by the finalists and judges can be purchased at any Barnes & Noble store, online at Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com/discover) or instantly downloaded on any NOOK® eBook reader or tablet.
 
The Jurists

Two panels of distinguished literary judges selected the finalists and will select the winners.

Serving as this year’s fiction judges are:

  • A. Manette Ansay, the author of a story collection, a memoir and six novels, including Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection, Midnight Champagne, an NBCC finalist, and Blue Water.  Her most recent novel is Good Things I Wish You. Ansay is Professor of English at the University of Miami, where she teaches in the MFA program.
  • Carrie Brown, the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University, and the  author of six novels and a story collection, among them The Last First Day (2013) and The Rope Walk (2007), and the 1995 Discover Award winner, Rose’s Garden.
  • Charles Yu, the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He was a recipient of a National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His most recent book is Sorry Please Thank You: Stories.

This year’s nonfiction judges are:

  • Gail Caldwell, the author of the forthcoming memoir, New Life, No Instructions, as well as Let's Take the Long Way Home (2010) and A Strong West Wind (2006).  The longtime chief book critic of The Boston Globe, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 2001.
  • Andre Dubus III, the author of six books, among them Dirty Love (2013) and the New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and Fog (a National Book Award finalist) and Townie. Dubus has been a awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and was a 2012 recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
  • Paul Elie, for many years a senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 2003. His most recent book is Reinventing Bach.

 

The Discover Awards

The Discover Great New Writers program 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 51 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 Amanda Coplin for The Orchardist and Cheryl Strayed for Wild (both 2012), Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (2007),  Ben Fountain for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals (2004), Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003), Anthony Doerr for The Shell Collector (2002), Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers (2001), Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), Elizabeth McCracken for The Giant’s House (1996), and Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker (1995).

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 673 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 695 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).