Barnes & Noble Announces the Winners of the 22nd Annual Discover Great New Writers Awards

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced that Amanda Coplin’s novel, The Orchardist (HarperCollins), and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (Alfred A. Knopf) have been named the winners of the 2012 Discover Awards for Fiction and Nonfiction, respectively. Each writer was awarded a cash prize of $10,000 and a full year of marketing and merchandising support from the Company.

Second-place winners were Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (Random House) for Fiction and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random House) for Nonfiction. Each award carries a $5,000 prize. Third place was awarded to The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (Reagan Arthur Books/Little Brown) for Fiction and Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen (Crown Publishing Group) for Nonfiction. Each received a $2,500 prize. The awards were presented this afternoon at a private ceremony in New York.

The Discover Great New Writers Awards are presented annually in recognition of one important quality: literary excellence. In the works of the six finalists, our literary jurists discovered the same remarkable talent our Discover readers identified and believe is an indication of even greater things to come.

The Jurists

Two panels of distinguished literary judges selected the winners and finalists. Serving as this year’s Fiction judges were Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and author of three books, including the 1998 Discover selection Hunger and, most recently, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost; Alan Cheuse, author of several books, including The Light Possessed, a 1990 Discover selection, and a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered; and Karl Marlantes, author of the national bestsellers Matterhorn (a 2010 Discover selection) and What It Is Like to Go to War.

This year’s Nonfiction judges were Susan Cheever, author of nine works of nonfiction, including Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography and five novels; Wendy McClure, author of the 2011 Discover selection The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, among other books; and Touré, co-host of MSNBC’s The Cycle and author of four books, among them The Portable Promised Land, a 2002 Discover selection, and most recently, I Will Die 4 U: How Prince Became an Icon.

The Discover Awards

The Discover Great New Writers program (www.bn.com/discover) 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 53 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 Scott O’Connor for Untouchable and Michael Levy for Kosher Chinese (both 2011), David Sheff for Beautiful Boy (2008), Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (2007), Ben Fountain for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006), Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts of No Nation (2005), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals (2004), Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003), Dina Temple-Ralston for A Death in Texas (2002), Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers (2001), Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), Carrie Brown for Rose’s Garden (1998), Elizabeth McCracken for The Giant’s House (1996), Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker (1995), and David Guterson for Snow Falling on Cedars (1994).

Books by the winners, finalists and judges can be purchased at any Barnes & Noble store, online at Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com) or instantly downloaded on any NOOK® reader or tablet. Additional information about the 2012 Discover Awards winners and judges can be found at www.bn.com/discover.

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 677 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 678 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).

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