Jennifer Bresnick has won Shelf Unbound’s first annual writing competition for Best Self-Published Book. Her debut novel, The Last Death of Tev Chrisini, was among 800 entries.

Bresnick began writing her book during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2009. From there, she self-published it using Amazon’s CreateSpace. The Kindle edition was released in March 2012 and the paperback version followed one month later.

Shelf Unbound publisher Margaret Brown had this statement in the announcement: “Bresnick’s enchanting Tolkien-esque epic fantasy The Last Death of Tev Chrisini captivated our judges from page one and held us in thrall through its conclusion 467 pages later. We fell in love with the story and its characters with Bresnick’s assured literary tale-spinning.”