Barnes & Noble Announces the Winners for the 21st Annual Discover Great New Writers Awards

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced that Scott O’Connor’s novel, Untouchable (Tyrus Press/a Division of F+W Media), and Michael Levy’s Kosher Chinese (Henry Holt & Co.) have been named the winners of the 2011 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 include Alice LaPlante’s novel Turn of Mind (Grove/Atlantic) for fiction and Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo (Free Press) for nonfiction. Each award carries a $5,000 prize. Third place was awarded to Volt by Alan Heathcock (Graywolf Press) for fiction and [sic]: a Memoir by Joshua Cody (W. W. Norton & Co.) for nonfiction. Each received a $2,500 prize. The awards were presented this afternoon at a private ceremony in New York.

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® eBook Reader.

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

The Jurists

Two panels of distinguished literary judges selected the winners. Serving as this year’s fiction judges are: Chris Abani, author of the 2004 Discover selection GraceLand and, most recently, the poetry collection, Sanctificum; Lauren Belfer, author of A Fierce Radiance and the 1999 Discover selection City of Light; and Bo Caldwell, author of the national bestsellers City of Tranquil Light and The Distant Land of My Father.

This year’s nonfiction judges are: Marie Arana, Writer-at-Large for The Washington Post and author of two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights, and a memoir, American Chica, a 2001 Discover Great New Writers selection; John Freeman, editor of Granta magazine and author of The Tyranny of E-Mail, a 2009 Discover selection; and Koren Zailckas, author of Fury and the 2005 Discover selection Smashed.

The Discover Awards

The Discover Great New Writers program (www.bn.com/discover) was established in 1990 to highlight works of exceptional literary quality that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book marketplace. This year’s selections featured the work of 55 new and previously underappreciated writers. Submissions to the program are read and discussed by a group of Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection for the program’s seasonal promotions.

Past winners of the annual Discover Great New Writers Award include Kim Echlin for The Disappeared and David R. Dow for The Autobiography of an Execution (both 2010), David Sheff for Beautiful Boy (2008), Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End (2007), Eric Blehm for The Last Season (2006), Nathaniel Fick for One Bullet Away (2005), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals (2004),Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003), Dina Temple-Ralston 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), Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker (1995), and David Guterson for Snow Falling on Cedars (1994).

Additional information about the 2011 Discover Award winners and judges can be found at www.bn.com/discover.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), the world's largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 691 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 641 college bookstores serving over 4.6 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through BN.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web's largest e-commerce sites, which also features more than two million titles in its NOOK Bookstore™ (www.bn.com/ebooks). Through Barnes & Noble’s NOOK™ eReading product offering, customers can buy and read digital books and content on the widest range of platforms, including NOOK devices, partner company products, and the most popular mobile and computing devices using free NOOK software.

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