2009 BOTYA Winners Announced
May 23, 2010—Foreword Reviews is pleased to announce the winners of the 2009 Book of the Year Awards and the Independent Publisher of the Year. At a ceremony today at BookExpo America in New York City, Foreword named 201 Book of the Year Award winners in 60 categories. These books, representing the best independently published works from 2009, were selected by a panel of librarian and bookseller judges.
Knife Song Korea: A Novel
Two books were also named Editor’s Choice Prize winners, a distinction that comes with a $1,500 cash prize. The Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction was given to the State University of New York Press for Knife Song Korea by Richard Selzer (978-1-4384-2761-4).
“This book recreates the Korean War from the perspective of a surgeon in the Army artillery,” said Book Review Editor Teresa Scollon. “It was originally written during the author’s own tour of duty, and the Korea rendered here feels surreal, yet exact.”
Rizzoli was presented with the Editor’s Choice Prize for Nonfiction for its book, La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy by the Italian Academy of Cuisine (978-0-8478-3147-0).
“La Cucina is a celebration of Italian home cooking that is 60 years in the making,” said Whitney Hallberg, Foreword’s managing editor. “The availability of these 2,000 traditional recipes in English is something to celebrate.”
The other category winners were selected by dozens of librarians and booksellers who are experts in the subject matter of the books they judged, and who make purchasing decisions daily for their collections or bookstores.
Other Press was named the Independent Publisher of the Year for its significant contributions in the categories of fiction, biography, psychology, and social science. Two novels from the publisher have previously been honored with Foreword’s Editors Choice Prize for Fiction: The Folded World by Amity Gaige in 2007 and Home Spun by Nilita Vachani in 2008.
Foreword’s founder and publisher, Victoria Sutherland, spoke at the awards ceremony and announced the winners.
“This year more than ever before, we heard from the judges how great the finalist books were and how difficult it was to make their decisions,” she said. “Despite this tough economy, independent publishers are producing some of the best books out there, and we are happy to honor them today.”
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