Barnes & Noble Announces 2001 Great New Writers Awards

Posted on March 8, 2002

Barnes & Noble, Inc. has announced that novelist Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton/HarperCollins), and Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers (Doubleday), are the winners of the 2001 Discover Great New Writers Awards for fiction and nonfiction. This year, the judges also selected four additional writers for prizes. First-time novelist Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River (Atlantic Monthly Press), and Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit won second-place awards, and Edward Carey's novel Observatory Mansions (Crown/Vintage) and Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (HarperCollins) took third-place honors.

The Discover Awards honor the works of the best new literary talents featured in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program during the 2001 calendar year as chosen by a jury panel of literary judges. Manil Suri and Hampton Sides each won cash prizes of $10,000 and over $75,000 in marketing and advertising support. The second-place winners each won $2,500, and the third-place winners each received $1,000. The awards were presented earlier this evening at a special ceremony at the Barnes & Noble store on Union Square in New York City.

Last year, the Discover Great New Writers program featured the work of 81 new fiction and nonfiction writers, with 72 authors qualifying for the Discover Award. Past winners include Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring; David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars; Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker; and Lily King, author of The Pleasing Hour.

The Death of Vishnu is the first in a proposed trilogy of novels by Manil Suri. The author's comic tale of a bustling apartment house in Bombay and the petty squabbles of its inhabitants brings to vivid life the tempestuous chaos that reigns in modern-day India.

In Ghost Soldiers, the nonfiction book winner, Hampton Sides skillfully reveals the hellish circumstances of the 513 American and British POWs left behind in the Philippines in the wake of the Bataan Death March, and the extraordinary account of their rescue by a group of U.S. Army Rangers.