Awards

This year’s winners of the Los Angeles Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been revealed, celebrating the best books of the year.

Below, we’ve linked to free samples of the award-winning books for your reading pleasure. The winners were revealed at ceremony on Friday.

GalleyCat covered the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books all weekend. The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman told us how to pitch a comic book to publishers and three nonfiction writers shared The Only 3 Pieces of Writing Advice You Will Ever Need to Read.

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The Triangle Awards, a ceremony which honors the best lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered fiction, nonfiction, and poetry was presented in New York this week.

Author Alison Bechdel, whose memoir Are You My Mother? comes out this spring, won the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement award this year. This is the third time the author has won an award at the event.

Here is more from the release: “She began keeping a journal at the age of ten and has been assiduously archiving her own life and times with words and pictures ever since. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a generational chronicle considered ‘one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.’” Read more

Snubbed by the Pulitzer Prize board, novelist Karen Russell has been named one of the five finalists for the Orion Book Award.

Check it out: “Each spring near Earth Day, an important work of fiction or nonfiction is presented with the Orion Book Award in recognition of its success in addressing the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought-provoking, and engaging manner … Nominations for the award are made by advisors, writers, editors, and contributing editors of Orion. Selection of the winning book and four finalists are made by a five-person selection committee, which changes annually.”

We’ve collected links to free samples of all five finalists below…

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Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James debuted on TIME magazine’s TIME 100 list this year, joining comedians turned writers and Steve Jobs’ biographer on the prestigious list.

TIME editor-at-large Brenda Luscombe wrote: “Six months ago she was Erika Leonard, a mother of two who dabbled in saucy stories for the Web. Now she’s E.L. James, publishing phenomenon, whose Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy has deeply stirred booksellers, Hollywood and, apparently, many, many mothers. Reading may never be the same.”

The TIME 100 list also included features about Ann Patchett (written by Elizabeth Gilbert), Walter Isaacson (written by Madeleine Albright), Stephen Colbert (written by Garry Trudeau), Chelsea Handler (written by Kathy Griffin), and Asghar Farhadi (written by Richard Corliss).

There was no Pulitzer Prize for fiction awarded this year. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace were all nominated.

Stephen Greenblatt won the General Nonfiction award for  The Swerve: How the World Became Modern and John Lewis Gaddis took the Biography award for George F. Kennan: An American Life.

Tracy K. Smith won the Poetry award with Life on Mars. The Drama award went to Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegria Hudes. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable won the History prize.   Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts by Kevin Puts was awarded the Music prize.

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The seven-year-old Huffington Post has won its first Pulitzer Prize for “Beyond the Battlefield,” a ten-part series about veterans by military correspondent David Wood. The series is also collected in a $4.99 eBook published by The Huffington Post.

Here’s more about the eBook: “As HuffPost’s senior military correspondent, David spent nine months speaking with severely wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to soldiers and their families, he interviewed more than two dozen military surgeons, combat medics, rehabilitation therapists, prosthetics engineers, nurses, operating room technicians and medical officials at the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and military hospitals and treatment facilities across the country.”

Here is a free excerpt from the book. Follow these links to download the eBook at Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has released its list of 2012 Fellows for the U.S. and Canada and the list includes a number of literary winners.

Robert S. Levine won the fellowship for American Literature. The English Literature fellows include: Denise Gigante, Andrea K. Henderson, Jonathan Lamb, Paul Stevens and James A. Winn. Margot E. Fassler and Ramie Targoff were awarded a fellowship for Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

Faith E. Beasley, William Luis, and Maxim D. Shrayer were awarded the fellowship for European and Latin American Literature. Judith Evans Grubbs and Melissa Lane won the fellowship for Classics and Alan Mintz won the fellowship for Literary Criticism. Read more

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) has revealed the winners of the 2012 Indies Choice Book Awards and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards, books that show “the spirit of independent bookstores.” Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the winners.

In an odd turn of events, brother and sister authors Maile Meloy and Colin Meloy tied for the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award this year.

ABA CEO Oren Teicher had this statement: “After a month of voting by the owners and staff at independent bookstores across the country, we have an outstanding list of winners that reflects the types of books independent bookstores champion best … We look forward to saluting the winners and honor recipients at the Celebration of Bookselling Author Awards Luncheon on June 5 at BEA.”

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As a publication dedicated to serious players in the publication and literary world, Poets & Writers is packed with inspiration and expert guidance needed for all stages of the writing process. There are no articles promising unrealistic fame and fortune, only practical advice, information, entertainment and opportunities for all talented writers.

One notable resource is P&W‘s extensive list of literary grants and awards, deadlines and prize winners. “Poets & Writers magazine provides the most comprehensive listing available in print,” said editor Kevin Larimer, “carefully vetted by the editorial staff to ensure that only legitimate prizes that will further the careers of winners are included.”

And if you know of an author who would make a great P&W profile, you could land a byline in the pub. Get best practices for pitching Larimer and his team in How To Pitch: Poets & Writers.

Publishing professionals can nominate their favorite young editor for the 2012 Ashmead Award. The winner will get a trip to the Yale Publishing Course in July.

Last year’s winner, Whitney Frick, was recently promoted to editor at Simon & Schuster’s Scribner imprint. The annual award was named after veteran editor Lawrence Peel “Larry” Ashmead (pictured) who passed away in September 2010. Applications will be accepted until May 15th.

Selection committee member and HarperCollins senior director of rights Brenda Segel explained: “The purpose behind the Ashmead award is to carry on Larry’s tradition of taking the time to mentor bright young editors and help them develop their careers in publishing. Publishing has long been acknowledged to be an apprenticeship business, and throughout his career, Larry never lost sight of the fact that the assistant answering a phone today is the editorial director of tomorrow, and today many people among two generations of publishing professionals credit Larry Ashmead with mentoring them.”