Major Book Awards Calendar For 2018 and Award Winners

Here’s a list of some of the Major Book Awards presented in 2018 – republished to highlight the winner (one of the winners) from one of the awards.

JANUARY

COSTA BOOK AWARDS

The Costa Book Awards is one of the UK’s most prestigious and popular literary prizes and recognizes some of the most enjoyable books of the year, written by authors based in the UK and Ireland. The prize has five categories – First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s Book – with one of the five winning books selected as the overall Costa Book of the Year.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman

First Novel Category Winner

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

Book of the Year – Inside the Wave, Helen Dunmore (winner of the Poetry category)

2018 DATES

• Nov. 21, 2017 – Shortlist
• Jan. 2, 2018 – Category winners
• Jan. 30, 2018 – Book of the Year

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FEBRUARY

Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction

Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Eagan

Best Fiction

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. ‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

2018 DATES

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MARCH

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS

The National Book Critics Circle Awards honor the best literature published in the United States in six categories – autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. These are the only national literary awards chosen by critics themselves.

Improvement, Joan Silber

Best Fiction – Winner

Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet she sees him through a three-month stint at Riker’s Island, their bond growing tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a youth that took her to Turkey and other far off places–and loves–around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that motherhood to four-year old Oliver might complicate a difficult situation. Little does she know that Boyd is pulling Reyna into a smuggling scheme, across state lines, violating his probation. When Reyna takes a step back, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.

2018 DATES

• Jan. 17, 2018 – Category Finalists
• Mar. 15, 2018 – Category Winners

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Stoker Award

Ararat, Christopher Golden

Superior Achievement in a Novel – Winner

When a newly engaged couple climbs Mount Ararat in Turkey, an avalanche forces them to seek shelter inside a massive cave uncovered by the snow fall. The cave is actually an ancient, buried ship that many quickly come to believe is really Noah’s Ark. When a team of scholars, archaeologists, and filmmakers make it inside the ark for the first time, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses. The artifact tempts their professional curiosity; so they break it open. Inside, they find an ugly, misshapen cadaver—not the holy man that they expected, a hideous creature with horns. A massive blizzard blows in, trapping them in that cave thousands of meters up the side of a remote mountain…but they are not alone.

2018 DATES

• Jan. 18, 2018 – Preliminary Ballot
• Feb. 22, 2018 – Finalists
  
• Mar. 3, 2018 – Winners

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APRIL

THE EDGAR AWARDS

The Edgar Awards are presented by the Mystery Writers of America honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television.

Bluebird, Bluebird, Attica Locke

Best Novel – Winner

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules, a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders–a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman–have stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes and save himself in the process, before Lark’s long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.

2018 DATES

• Jan. 18, 2018 – Nominees
• Apr. 26, 2018 – Winners

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PULITZER PRIZE

The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States.

Less, Andrew Sean Greer

Fiction – Winner

You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes–it would be too awkward–and you can’t say no–it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.

 2018 DATES

• Apr. 26, 2018 – Winners and Nominated finalists

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The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature is an award for literary books by Caribbean writers. Books are judged in three categories: poetry, fiction and literary non-fiction. The three category winners will then be judged to determine the overall winner.

Curfew Chronicles, Jennifer Rahim

Winner

Set over one day during curfew in Trinidad and Tobago. Lucid, fast moving short stories from multiple perspectives that coalesce into a novel.

2018 DATES

• March – Longlist
• April – Shortlist
• Apr. 28, 2017 – Overall Winner

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May

Nebula Awards

The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3), N.K. Jemisin

Best Novel – Winner
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe. For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too l

 

2018 DATES

• Feb. 20, 2018 – Nominees
• May 19, 2018 – Winners

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JUNE

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

The Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction is a UK-based award honoring women writers around the globe.

Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie

Best Novel – Winner

Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to … or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

2018 DATES

• Mar. 8, 2017 – Longlist
• Apr. 23, 2017 – Shortlist
  
• Jun. 6, 2017 – Winners
  

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Man Booker International Prize

The Man Booker International Prize is awarded for fiction translated into English and published in the UK.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Jennifer Croft

Winner

A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.

2018 DATES

• Mar. 2018, – Longlist
• Apr. 2018, – Shortlist
• Jun. 2018, – Winner

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Audie Awards

The Audie Awards recognizes distinction in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment in 29 categories.

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders – Read by Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, George Saunders, and a Full Cast

Audiobook of the Year – Winner

Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state – called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

2018 DATES

May 31, 2018 – Winners & Finalists

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JULY

Thriller Awards

The Thriller Awards honor the best writing of the year. Categories include Hardcover Novel, First Novel, Paperback Original, Young Adult, Short Story and e-Book Original.

Final Girls, Riley Sager

Best Hardcover Novel 2017

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout’s knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them. That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy’s doorstep. 

2018 DATES

• Apr. 2018 – Finalists
• Jul. 14, 2018 – Winners

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Shirley Jackson Award

The Shirley Jackson Awards was established in recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

The Hole, Hye-Young Pyun. Translated by Sora Kim-Russell

Best Novel – Winner

In this tense, gripping novel by a rising star of Korean literature, Ogi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife’s life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Ogi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house. But soon Ogi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.

 

2018 DATES

• May 4, 2018 – Nominees
• Jul. 2018 – Winners

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RITA Awards

The purpose of the RITA (Romance) Awards is to promote excellence in the romance genre by recognizing outstanding published romance novels and novellas.

Second Chance Summer (Camp Firefly Falls #9), Kait Nolan

Contemporary Romance: Mid-Length Winner

Professor Audrey Graham shouldn’t be alive. She shouldn’t have ever walked again according to the doctors. But after two years of physical therapy and countless surgeries, she’s got a second lease on life. First stop? Camp Firefly Falls to try and catch up on some of the living she never did before her accident. Firefighter Hudson Lowell shouldn’t be alive. In the wake of losing two members of his team in a structure fire gone wrong, he’s been unable to work, unable to pull himself out of the survivor’s guilt. In a last ditch effort to snap him out of it, his family surprises him with a 2 week reunion session at Camp Firefly Falls, reminder of a simpler, better time. The last thing he expects to find is the woman he helped cut out of a snarled up wreck of a car two years before.

 

2018 DATES

• Mar. 21, 2018 – Finalists
• Jul. 19, 2018 – Winners

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Arthur C. Clarke Award

The Arthur C. Clarke Award is an annual award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.

Dreams Before the Start of Time, Anne Charnock

Winner 2017

Through a series of interconnected vignettes that spans five generations and three continents, this emotionally taut story explores the anxieties that arise when the science of fertility claims to deliver all the answers.

2018 DATES

• May 2, 2018 – Shortlist
• Jul. 18, 2018 – Winner

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AUGUST

The Hugo Awards

The Hugo Awards Winners are for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy.

The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3), N.K. Jemisin

Best Novel – Winner
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe. For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.

 

2018 DATES

• Mar. 31, 2018 – Finalists
• Aug. 19, 2018

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OCTOBER

Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK.

Milkman, Anna Burns

Winner

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.

 

2018 DATES

• July 23, 2018 – Longlist
• Sep. 20, 2018 – Shortlist
• Oct. 16, 2018 – Winner

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November

The Christy Awards

The Christy Awards is designed to nurture and encourage creativity and quality in the writing and publishing of fiction written from a Christian worldview and showcase the diversity of genres.

True to You, Becky Wade

Book of the Year 2017

After a devastating heartbreak three years ago, genealogist and historical village owner Nora Bradford decided that burying her nose in her work and her books is far safer than romance in the here and now. Unlike Nora, former Navy SEAL John Lawson is a modern-day man, usually 100 percent focused on the present. However, when John, an adoptee, is diagnosed with an inherited condition, he’s forced to dig into the secrets of his ancestry. John enlists Nora’s help to uncover the identity of his birth mother, and as they work side by side, this pair of opposites begins to suspect that they just might be a perfect match. But can their hope for a future survive their wounds from the past?

2018 DATES

• Sep., 19, 2018 – Finalists
• Nov. 7, 2018 – Winners

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The Giller Prize

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is a literary award given to a Canadian author of a novel or short story collection published in English the previous year.

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan

Winner
In 1830, two English brothers arrive at a Barbados sugar plantation, bringing with them a darkness beyond what the slaves have already known. Washington Black, an eleven-year-old field slave, is horrified to find himself chosen to live in the quarters of one of these men. But his new master is not as Washington expects him to be. He is the eccentric Christopher Wilde, naturalist, explorer, inventor and abolitionist, whose obsession with perfecting a winged flying machine disturbs all who know him. Washington is initiated into a world of wonder: a world where the night sea viewed from a hilltop explodes with light, where a simple cloth canopy can propel a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning—and where two people separated by an impossible divide can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed one fateful night, Washington is left at the mercy of his new masters.

 

2018 DATES

• Sep. 17, 2018  – Longlist
• Oct. 1, 2018 – Shortlist
• Nov. 19, 2018 – Winner

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World Fantasy Awards

The World Fantasy Awards are a set of awards given each year for the best fantasy fiction published during the previous calendar year.

The Changeling, Victor LaValle

Novel – Winner (Tie with Jade City, Fonda Lee)

Apollo Kagwa has had strange dreams that have haunted him since childhood. An antiquarian book dealer with a business called Improbabilia, he is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange. Disconnected and uninterested in their new baby boy, Emma at first seems to be exhibiting all the signs of post-partum depression, but it quickly becomes clear that her troubles go far beyond that. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent’s comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air.

2019 DATES

• Nov. 4, 2018 – Winner
• Jul. 25, 2018 – Nominees

 

 

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National Book Award

The National Book Awards celebrates the best in American literature.

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

Fiction – Winner

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

2018 DATES

• Sep 12,. 2018 – Longlist
• Oct. 10, 2018 – Shortlist
• Nov. 15, 2018 – Winners

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Do you pay attention to literary awards? Which ones? Have you read any of these award winning books?

(Photo by César Viteri on Unsplash)