Award Winners

The Alabama Authors Award : The Alabama Authors Award presented by the Alabama Library Association during its annual convention seeks to encourage and recognize Alabama authors and promote interest in local authors' books whether the books are about Alabama or another subject. Awards are based on literary merit. A recipient must be an Alabamian or must have lived in Alabama for at least five (5) years. The book for which the recipient is honored must have been published within the past three (3) calendar years prior to the convention at which the award is presented. Reprints of works originally published prior to the cutoff year of the award are not eligible; neither are an author's body of works. An editor or translator may be considered if the book is of value to the permanent record of the state. Recipients must be living. Each year the Authors Awards Committee may recommend to the Alabama Library Association Council that awards be given to one book in each of three categories: Juvenile/Young Adult, Fiction, and Nonfiction. In any given year, the committee may recommend that no award be given in a particular category is no book of sufficient quality is under consideration.

2002 Tongues of Flame & 1986 It Wasn't All Dancing. Mary Ward Brown, E.P. Dutton, 1986. Mary Ward Brown is a double winner of the Alabama Authors Award presented annually by the Alabama Library Association. In 1986, she received the award for Tongues of Flame and in 2003 for It Wasn't All Dancing. Both of these short story collections feature stories of the Deep South told from a woman's point of view. Her unique style. fully realized characters, deep sensitivity, and definite sense of place and time.....is evident in each of her stories. She deals with real people in real situations and shows amazing compassion for her characters. Both Tongues of Flame and It Wasn't All Dancing contain eleven stories. In each of these, Mary Ward Brown proves herself a gifted storyteller.

1987 Home Fires Burning & 1991 Old Dogs and Children. By Robert Inman. Little, Brown,.1987. Robert Inman is another double winner of the Alabama Authors Award presented annually by the Alabama Library Association. In 1987 he received the award for Home Fires Burning and in 1991 for Old Dogs and Children. Both of these novels are set in a small Southern town. Both feature charming, irresistible main characters. Jake Tibbetts in Home Fires Burning and Bright Birdsong in Old Dogs and Children and down-home situations that are in some cases funny, in other cases heart-rending, but in all cases entertaining. In each of these novels, Robert Inman offers a good story, well told and there's little more any novelist can do.

Agatha Awards: The Agatha Awards, named for Agatha Christie, are awarded for the Best Novel, First Mystery Novel, Nonfiction, and Short Story in the genre for the previous year, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie. The award honors mysteries which (1) contain no explicit sex nor excessive or violence, and (2) feature an amateur detective, a confined setting, and characters who know each other.

Anthony Awards: The Anthony Awards are announced at the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, the largest annual gathering of mystery fans, writers, booksellers and assorted other partners in crime. Both the award and the convention is named in honor of the late Anthony Boucher (William Anthony Parker White), a well-known writer, influential critic, and enthusiastic fan of the mystery genre. (1992 Bootlegger’s Daughter)

1992. Bootlegger's Daughter. by Margaret Maron. Warner Books, 1992. Winner of four major awards for mystery writing... the Agatha, the Macavity, the Anthony, and the Edgar...Bootlegger's Daughter features North Carolina attorney Deborah Knott. This time around Deborah is running for district judge in Colleton County. As the strong-willed daughter of Kezzie Knott... notorious bootlegger, ex-con, and political string-puller... she finds that her family's long history is both an asset and a liability in her campaign. But, it's an episode from the more recent past that threatens to defeat her. Eighteen years ago, Deborah baby-sat little Gayle Whitehead for her mother Janie and then both mother and daughter disappeared. Three days later, a dehydrated, dirty, and hungry Gayle was found along with her mother's body. The murder, having gone unsolved for eighteen years, once again captivates everyone's attention when Gayle asks Deborah to investigate. As she goes from stop to stop on the campaign trail, Deborah is distracted from her political race as new evidence comes to light. She finds that she is posing a threat to a successful murderer and this has an adverse affect on her bid for election. Not only is this a well-researched and crafted mystery, but it is also a top-notch Southern novel.

Audie Awards: Established in 1996, the Audie Awards are presented by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), a not-for-profit trade organization consisting of over 200 member companies including publishers, retailers, distributors, and suppliers along with other industries related to the production, promotion, and sale of audiobooks. The award is presented for excellence in spoken-audio publishing. The Audies are presented at the annual APA conference, The mandate of the APA is to deal with the concerns of the industry; assure the ongoing production of high quality products; to initiate research and the distribution of relevant data; and to nurture solid relationships among the consumers, the resellers, and the industry itself.

2002 – Solo Narration – Male – narrator Frank Muller
Barker, Clive. Coldheart Canyon. HarperCollins, 2001. Harper Audio, 2001. In 1920, a glamorous movie vamp and her manager go shopping in her homeland, Romania. They purchase the panorama on the walls of a subterranean room in an ancient fortress-turned-monastery. The painted-tile picture depicts a vast and obscene hunt, and virtually every tile contains a scene of sadistic sex between people, animals, and monsters. The tiles are remounted in the star's mansion in Coldheart Canyon, a Hollywood residential area that is, by the twenty-first century, hard to find and harder to leave. Action star Todd Pickett’s manager finds the place for him, though, when, after a face-lift gone awry, he needs to retreat from paparazzi and public. The head of his fan club finds it, too, but not before Todd discovers the vamp, her 1920s beauty intact, still on the premises. Zephyr, her manager is there, too, and the fan-club president encounters him shortly before being whisked off by ghosts, only to resurface later to fight, with various other characters, for Todd's soul. For the hunt restarts every time new prey comes to it. As a Hollywood insider with a keen eye for its idiocies and horrors Clive Barker is uniquely positioned to write this vitriolic Tinseltown ghost story. Coldheart Canyon is an irresistible and unmerciful picture of Hollywood and its demons, told with all the style and raw narrative power that have made Barker's books and films a worldwide phenomenon. Frank Muller chillingly portrays this icy story of Hollywood lust and dysfunction, dusting the glitter off the stars and bringing alive the movie set. His always brilliant characterizations alternately incite sympathy and deep disgust. With inspired understanding of subtext, Muller portrays the graphic scenes of depraved sexual activity with a flatness that, more than any type of enthusiasm, conveys their total lack of intimacy. Just another example of why Frank Muller was proclaimed audio’s first superstar!

2002 – Fiction – Unabridged – narrator Frank Muller
King, Stephen & Peter Straub. The Talisman. Viking, 1984. Simon & Schuster Audio, 2001. The unbeatable team of Stephen King and Frank Muller provides another winner, this time with Peter Straub lending his unique magic to the game. Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer wants to save his mother's life. To do so, he must revisit unanswered questions from early childhood and face the truths his late father understood. Jack's quest takes him into parallel worlds, one of which provides the answers he needs. Frank Muller enters the fantasy with abandon. His performance shifts invisibly between the childish visions of a young Jack to the self-serving evil of his antagonist's inner thoughts. As always, Muller's characterizations steal the show. Werewolves, boys, rotten evangelists, and Jack's mom come alive far beyond the level at which the text gives them soul.

Ancient black jazz musician Speedy Parker drops in and out of the story as another performer entirely, or so it would seem. Our level of disbelief is not only suspended, it flies right out the window on Muller's capable wings. Also the Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.

2002 – Humor – narrator George Karlan
Karlan, George. Napalm & Silly Putty. Hyperion, 2001. Highbridge Company, 2001. Those who have liked George Carlin in the past may just roll on the floor. Or wince. Or yawn. It's much of the same old stuff--in-your-face raw language and toilet humor interspersed with sharp political satire and a playful exploration of the absurdities of the English language. There are laugh-out-loud segments along the way, and most listeners will find something that tickles. A routine about getting stoned in an airplane bathroom has its moments but needs serious editing. Delivery is just right. Carlin knows timing, and makes the most of his material. There's something for everyone!

2002 – Solo Narrator – Author – narrator Rick Bragg
Bragg, Rick. Ava’s Man. Knopf, 2001. Randum House Audiobooks, 2001. Bragg's telling of his maternal grandfather's life is eloquent and touching, and his spare prose is alive with fresh metaphors and memorable sentences. Bragg never knew Charlie Bundrum, who died prematurely at age 51 in 1958; the story of this proud, flawed, loving and much-loved hero of Depression-era Appalachia is derived from family and community oral history. Interestingly, this book emerged because readers of Bragg's best-selling book about his mother, All Over but the Shoutin', wanted to understand the force that drove her to be such a strong figure. Few actors could have read this work as well as the author has. Bragg's Appalachian accent, slightly polished by Northern living, adds authenticity to the fine, funny and painful anecdotes that made up his grand-father's life and to the feelings each story encompasses. His smooth reading enhances the rhythms and sounds of his prose, rendering with genuine sincerity his deep admiration for his people and for the vanishing culture they represent. Also winner Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award

2000 – Mystery Fiction
Walters, Minette. The Breaker. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1999. Recorded Books, 2000. The corpse of an attractive and pregnant woman is discovered washed ashore on the rocky Dorset coast in England. She has been drugged and sexually assaulted, her fingers deliberately broken, her body lashed to a dinghy to ensure her slow and painful death. What resident of the seaside village could be capable of such an atrocious crime? It's telling about the current state of English seaside villages that there are three prime suspects handy. Steven Harding, an actor whose most recent roles have been pornographic and who likes to sail, discovers the body. His friend Tony Bridges may have been jealous enough of Steven to try to shift blame for the murder onto him. And there is the victim's husband, who may have been pushed just far enough to murder his errant wife.

Walters plumbs the human psyche in gritty fashion, working language with a skill that few can equal. Her work is showcased remarkably in audio format, especially when the vocal instrument is Simon Prebble's. From the book's introductory scene of a woman's rape, mutilation and death to a later eerie imitation of the same brutality-Prebble gets it right. Leading us through tortuous routes of investigation with characterizations that are incomparable, he reveals each voice in the heat of the moment, along with all its underlying emotional subtext. There are many compelling (and repelling) characters here, and we become fully acquainted with them.

Book Sense Book of the Year Award: Formerly known as the ABBY (American Booksellers Book of the Year), this award was inaugurated at BookExpo America 2000. The American Booksellers Association renamed the award in recognition of both a new era in bookselling, heralded by the BOOK SENSE PROGRAM, as well as the important role that the Book Sense 76 List has played for independent booksellers in discovering and spreading the word to all stores about books of quality. Book Sense independent booksellers from across the country nominate the books that they most enjoyed hand selling to their customers throughout the year. This list represents a combined national and locale staff pick selection of booksellers’ favorites from more than 1100 independent bookstores with the Book Sense program. Five nominees for Book Sense Book of the Year are released in both the Adult & Children’s categories.

Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. McMurray & Beck, 1999. Reading Vreeland's book is like opening up a Chinese box: each chapter reveals a new layer of meaning and import. The "novel" follows the trail of an "unknown" painting by the Dutch master Vermeer—"The Girl in Hyacinth Blue" from the time of its creation in seventeenth-century Holland to the present day. In each of the eight independent but chronologically linked chapters, the painting shows up as a prop in the lives of different owners, and in telling the circumstances under which these people acquire or lose the painting, Vreeland gives the readers a sense of the evolution of Dutch social history. The first chapter opens with the discovery of the painting in the basement of a mathematician. It turns out that he inherited it from his father, who was a Nazi looter in Holland during World War II. The second chapter features the circumstances of the Jewish family from whom the painting was stolen. The remaining chapters take the readers further back into Dutch history until the final, or rather the original, moment when Vermeer decided to paint the portrait of his daughter, a young girl dressed in hyacinth blue. True to the spirit of Vermeer, Vreeland uses art as a vehicle for capturing special moments in the lives of ordinary people; true, too, to Vermeer's legacy, she creates art that brings a unique pleasure into the lives of ordinary readers. This book also won other minor awards: Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Prize, Honorable Mention (1998); The San Diego Book Association’s The THEODOR GEISEL AWARD for the best book of the year by a San Diego author. Also: the International Dublin Literary Award, Forward Magazine’s Best Novel of the Year (1999-2000); Independent Publisher Magazine, Storyteller of the Year (1999); San Diego’s Writer’s Monthly Magazine, Woman of the Woman (1999-2000); Inkwell’s Magazine’ Grand Prize for Fiction (1999).

Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award (BCALA): The BCALA Literary Awards were founded by Dr. Alex Boyd, Director, Newark Public Library, and Cecil Hixon, Adult Programming Specialist, New York Public Library, to recognize outstanding works of Fiction and Nonfiction by African American authors for adult audiences. Winners of the BCALA Literary Award for Fiction and Nonfiction receive the BCALA Medallion and an honorarium of $500. Certificates are given to the authors of books named as Honor, First Novelist, and Outstanding Contribution to Publishing. Titles honored are outstanding depictions of the cultural, historical, and sociopolitical aspects of the Black Diaspora experience and are selected by a panel of seven librarians. The books must be published in the year prior to the award. Winners are announced each year during ALA's Midwinter Meeting and the awards are presented at the ALA Annual Conference.

1999 Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do by Valerie Wilson Wesley. Avon Books, 1999. Eva Hutchinson is a forty-year-old African American female who has just experienced a major change in her life. Her husband of ten years, Hutch, has walked out of her life because he feels there is no "joy" left in their marriage. Left in a large house with only her thoughts and a pet cat named Bama, she is left to deal with life from a new perspective. Rejuvenated by a handsome younger lover, she finds temporary happiness. Eva’s daughter, Charley has just decided that she wants to ditch plans to attend law-school to become a stand-up comedian. Hutch has begun to have an affair with his rich best friends’ wife. Stephen, Hutch’s adult son, has a shocking secret that will blow Hutch’s mind. In this book, the ups and downs of the key players make for a very interesting read. In the game of life they all find out it ain’t nobody’s business how it’s played.

Booker Award: The Booker Prize (or The Booker McConnell Prize) was founded in 1969 by Booker McConnell, a multinational conglomerate company. Administered by the National Book League in the United Kingdom, this prestigious award is awarded to the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the UK, the Commonwealth, Eire, Pakistan, or South Africa.

1988 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. Vintage, 1988. The novel opens upon Oscar as a young boy whose mother has died and whose father is a self-absorbed botanist, leaving Oscar to develop into a shy, awkward, and equally self-absorbed young man. At the same time in the outback of Australia, young Lucinda, pretty, precocious, and even more self-absorbed, comes of age as her father dies, followed soon by her mother, and she is literally ripped from the land she feels is rightfully hers and forced to start a new life abroad. Eventually Oscar, having rejected his father's faith, become an Anglican priest, become addicted to gambling (which he is very good at), and discovering that his erroneous gambling tips have led to the suicide of his benefactor, decides to go to Australia despite his fear of water. Oscar and Lucinda meet aboard the ship that takes them both to Sidney, discover their mutual predilection for gambling, and the rest is a breathless, exhausting adventure that reveals the boundless varieties of the human character. Together they decide to build a glass church and move it to the center of the outback, a project that signifies redemption to Oscar and artistic justice to Lucinda. Australia's worst and best people the events that follow. Oscar's feelings for the natives prompts him to kill the trek leader, who murders the aborigines without discretion. Somehow, he makes it to a safe harbor where he is raped by a widow desperate for a husband. Driven to distraction, Oscar finds sanctuary within the glass church, which has been left on a barge on the river, and dies silently as the church sinks. The story is told by Oscar's great-grandson, descended from the baby conceived by the desperate widow, which makes Oscar and Lucinda's thwarted and impossible love even more tragic and ironic. Carey's writing is flawless, his language and style reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and the story itself fairy-tale-like in its mood, but utterly real in its description of the human heart.

1987 Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. Grove Press, New York, 1987. Lively's novel is told through the voice of its heroine, Claudia Hampton, who lies dying in an English hospital. Claudia's life has been charged with adventure--she worked as a war correspondent in Africa during WWII, she is the well-known author of historical novels, and she worked briefly in the film industry--but also stunted by tragedy and a lack of real, enduring love--her long-term affair is thwarted by her unwillingness to love a man so independent from her and her relationship with her daughter is distant at best. As Claudia recounts the fragments of her life that flit through her brain sporadically, the secret to her heart is revealed in her intense love for two men: her brother and a young tank commander during the war. Her incestuous young love for her brother bonds them for life and leads to passionate jealousies later as he marries and she finds true love in the arms of Tom Southern. Claudia and Tom's idyllic love is cut short when he is killed by a mine in the Libyan desert and Claudia, senseless with grief, is unable to stop the abortion performed on her by a group of nuns. It is her remarkable love for Tom and the loss of her one link to him that drives Claudia to reject all other forms of love. Despite her seemingly-romantic life, Claudia is at core a woman haunted by life's failure to meet her expectations, and even as an old woman dying amid thoughts of the weird workings of history, it is her own history that she cannot unravel. Lively's writing is sparse but perceptible and her heroine perhaps the most complex in modern literature.

1981 Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie. Knopf, 1980. 1001 children are born in India on August 15, 1947 at the stroke of midnight, the precise moment when the subcontinent becomes independent from Great Britain. Roughly half are good, roughly half are sinister, some vacillate and swoon over the other side. Many have paranormal capabilities. All battle over the soul of their nation. The prime character in this lot is Saleem Sinai who must make his choice (as all the midnight’s children wrestle with choice) about what kind of India he will help create. Without ever meeting you, I can safely say you have probably never read a novel as all encompassing, as mesmerizing, as phantasmagorical as this one. It’s also enjoyable and hilarious, too. And as those last five adjectives describe everyone’s life, not just the life of Saleem, it’s also a mirror held up to every reader fortunate enough to find it. Rushdie is also the author of The Satanic Verses.

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawar Jhabvala. Simon and Schuster, 1975. This novel slips back and forth between the present--told in the words of a young English woman who has traveled to India in order to discover the secrets of her step-grandmother's past--and that past--1920's India and a bored colonial housewife named Olivia. Olivia's story is the central theme of the novel, the theme of human intolerance and the inadequacies of a marriage based on social mores. Olivia is young and seemingly in love with her handsome new husband, a colonial department head, and excited about her new life in India. Her fascination with India is squashed by the intolerance of her English compatriots and her husband's banality. She finds herself pulled ever closer into the intrigue and romance of the Nawab, a minor prince who resides in a lonely castle. When Olivia elopes with the Nawab, the English community is scandalized, but eventually goes on as if nothing has happened. Olivia and her prince live in seclusion where he grows obese and just as banal as her English husband. Her step-granddaughter's struggle to understand what happened to Olivia and her mutual love for India seem, in the end, to redeem Olivia's actions. The novel is sensually written and contains all of the mysticism, intrigue, and tragedy of Indian writing as well as the pragmatism and irony of the English. It is an interesting drama of West meeting East and, eventually, coming to embrace it.

Bram Stoker Awards: the Horror Writers Association (HWA) was formed in the 1980s to bring together writers and others professionally interested in horror and dark fantasy and to foster a greater appreciation of dark fiction among the general public. To do so, HWA issues a regular newsletter and presents the Bram Stoker Awards. The HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION gives the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement annually. The winners are determined by vote of the Active members of HWA, and the awards themselves are presented at HWA's Annual Meeting and Awards Banquet.

1997 The Green Mile : The Complete Serial Novel by Stephen King. Penquin Books, 1996. When Stephen King originally wrote The Green Mile as a series of six novellas, he didn't even know how the story would turn out. As far as I am concerned, it turned out to be one of his finest stories. The setting is the small "death house" of a Southern prison in 1932. The Green Mile is the hall with a floor "the color of tired old limes" that leads to "Old Sparky" (the electric chair). The likable narrator is an old man, a prison guard, looking back on the events decades later. The Green Mile won a 1997 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, and it was made into fine film starring Tom Hanks.