Barnes & Noble Announces the Winners of the 23rd Annual Discover Great New Writers Awards

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), one of the nation's largest booksellers and the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced that Anthony Marra's novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth/Crown Publishing Group), and Justin St. Germain's memoir, Son of a Gun (Random House) have been named the winners of the 2013 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 bookseller.

Second place winners are NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (Little, Brown & Co.) for fiction and Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave (Alfred A. Knopf) for nonfiction. Each award carries a $5,000 cash prize. Third place was awarded to Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) for fiction and With or Without You by Domenica Ruta (Spiegel & Grau) for nonfiction. Each received a $2,500 cash prize.

The awards were presented this afternoon at a private ceremony in New York City.

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

Books by the 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.

The Jurists

Two panels of distinguished literary judges – all of whom have had books selected for the Discover Great New Writers program – selected the winners. Serving as this year's fiction judges are: A. Manette Ansay, Professor of English at the University of Miami, where she teaches in the MFA program, and the author of Good Things I Wish You, Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection, and Blue Water, among other books; Carrie Brown, the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University, whose books include The Last First Day, The Rope Walk, and Rose's Garden, winner of the 1998 Discover Award; and Charles Yu, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 recipient and author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine, Third Class Superhero, and Sorry Please Thank You.

This year's nonfiction judges are: Gail Caldwell, recipient of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and author of three memoirs, New Life, No Instructions (forthcoming), Let's Take the Long Way Home and A Strong West Wind; Andre Dubus III, recipient of multiple awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the author of six books, among them Dirty Love, and national bestsellers House of Sand and Fog and Townie; and Paul Elie, author of Reinventing Bach and The Life You Save May Be Your Own, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award.

The Discover Awards

The Discover Great New Writers program (www.bn.com/discover) was established in 1990 to highlight debut works of exceptional literary quality noted for gorgeous prose, indelible characters and powerful storytelling that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book marketplace. This year's selections featured the works of 51 writers. Submissions to the program are read and discussed by a group of Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection for the program's quarterly lists.

Past winners of the annual Discover Great New Writers Award include Cheryl Strayed for Wild and Amanda Coplin for The Orchardist (both 2012), 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-Raston for A Death in Texas (2002), Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers (2001), Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), Elizabeth McCracken for The Giant's House (1996), and Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker (1995).

Additional information about the 2013 Discover Award winners and judges can be found at www.bn.com/discover.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. BKS is a Fortune 500 company and the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products. The company operates 663 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 696 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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