The New England Independent Booksellers Association named this year’s winners of the New England Book Awards. The 2009 recipients include the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March for Fiction, Geraldine Brooks. Naturalist and radio commentator Sy Montgomery, whose Walking With the Great Apes will be reissued by Chelsea Green in August, received the award for Nonfiction, while Christopher and Edgar Award-winner Andrew Clements, known for Frindle among others, received the Children’s award.
Thirty-five-year-old Tilbury House in Gardiner, Maine, was named publisher of the year. Among its top sellers are: Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop; Peggy Moss’s Say Something, illus. by Lea Lyon; and Bradford Brown’s While You’re Here Doc: Farmyard Adventures of a Maine Veterinarian.
Founded in 1990, the New England Book Awards are given annually to recognize authors living in New England for a body of work, as well as a regional New England publisher. Nominations are accepted from the more than 400 bookstores and publishers that are members of NEIBA. The recipients of the 2009 awards will be honored at a ceremony at the NEIBA annual convention and trade show in Hartford, Conn., at the beginning of October.
