Finalists Named for Barnes & Noble's 2001 Discover Great New Writers Awards

Posted on February 1, 2002

Barnes & Noble announced the short list for its 2001 Discover Great New Writers Awards. This year, for the first time, Barnes & Noble will award two $10,000 prizes: one for fiction and one for nonfiction. Second place winners will receive $2,500 and third place finalists, $1,000.

The finalists are:

Fiction

Edward Carey, Observatory Mansions (Crown)
Leif Enger, Peace Like a River (Atlantic Monthly)
Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton)

Nonfiction

Peter Hessler, River Town (HarperCollins)
Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit (Random House)
Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers (Doubleday)

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, March 6th, at 7:30 p.m., in a special ceremony at Barnes & Noble's Union Square store in New York City, located at 33 East 17th Street. The Discover Great New Writers Award, presented annually since 1993, has honored the best work of literary fiction featured in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program during the previous calendar year. The 2001 Discover Awards carry a cash prize of $10,000, over $75,000 in marketing and advertising support, and an engraved crystal award from Tiffany & Co.

"We're thrilled to add a new dimension to the Discover Award by bringing compelling works of narrative nonfiction, as well as literary fiction, to a wider reading public," said Jill Lamar, manager and editor of the Discover Great New Writers program. "The titles have already found a following, in part due to the work of the Discover program. The program, which finds and reads the selections before they are published, gets behind them before the reviews and the publicity kick in."

A panel of literary jurors selected the finalists and will select the winners. This year's fiction jurors are Francisco Goldman, author of several novels, including The Long Night of White Chickens and The Ordinary Seaman; Ron Hansen, author of Hitler's Niece and a National Book Award finalist for his novel, Atticus; and Elizabeth McCracken, author of Niagara Falls All Over Again, and winner of the 1996 Discover Award for her novel, The Giant's House. The nonfiction judges are Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood; Mark Doty, an acclaimed poet and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his memoir, Heaven's Coast; and Kathleen Norris, the New York Times bestselling author of The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, among other works.