Welcome back to Book Break! In this video, we are talking about prize-winning books. BookTube gets
very excited around awards season. Particularly prizes like the Women's Prize gets a lot of love
on BookTube, so in this video I wanted to look at some of the other literary prizes,
and some of the amazing books to have won these prizes that you might not have picked up yet.
Starting with a big one, the winner of this year's Booker prize, which is arguably the biggest,
most talked about literary award of the year. And the winner of this year was our very own
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain is a boy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s with an
alcoholic mother called Agnes who he adores, and who adores him, but whose addiction and unhappy
marriage are tearing her apart. So it's a really heartbreaking story watching this young boy grow
up, realising that he's gay, and coming to terms with that and trying to care for his
beloved mother. And both of these characters are just so real and so human that it is no surprise
it won the Booker. The Booker prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards that there is,
if not the most, so you know with that seal of approval, this book really is that good.
The Books Are My Bag awards are really fun, because these are curated by bookshops. And
they have a reader's choice award as well, so these are very popular on BookTube. In fact
BookTube's own Jean from Jean Bookishthoughts won the breakthrough author prize in 2020 for her book
Greek Myths, which is just absolutely stunning, a great way to learn about Greek mythology.
In this book Jean retells some of the most iconic stories for a whole new generation. And it's got
beautiful illustrations the whole way through as well, so generally a gorgeous book. But I also
wanted to show you The Secret Barrister which won the Books Are My Bag non-fiction award in 2018.
So The Secret Barrister is a real barrister. Their identity is kept anonymous because they
are spilling insider secrets about the UK legal system and how it's broken. So it's a
very eye-opening book, it's also a very passionate book, that is really pushing for change to better
help and support people. Moving on to a children's book, the next book I'm going to show you is by an
author who won the New Talent Award in the 2017 AOI World Illustration Awards. So this is Little
Red by Bethan Woollvin. This is a really dark funny twist on The Little Red Riding Hood story.
And Bethan Woollvin has such a great illustration style. I love these really bold colour schemes.
And she really is a great new talent because since this book she's gone on to do Hansel and Gretel,
Rapunzel, and a whole new story called I Can Catch a Monster. She really specialises in these
empowering slightly dark children's stories, and she's brilliant. OK for the next book we're going
back in time. I'm going to show you the book that won the 1996 Betty Trask award, which is an award
given to an author under the age of 35. And this book also won the Whitbread award for first novel,
which you may recognise as it's now known as the Costa prize. So that book is The Debt to Pleasure
by John Lanchester. This is a very funny, dark, twisted book about an unforgettable protagonist
called Tarquin Winot, on a trip through France under the guise of completing a cookbook.
So you get to hear his very opinionated thoughts on food, but as the book goes on you realise he's
also a very unreliable narrator, and the mission he's on is a lot more sinister than it originally
seemed. A relatively recent prize is the Big Book Awards. So these are run by the publisher Hearst,
and they get all of their magazines and websites involved, backing their own lists in different
genres. So in 2018 Good Housekeeping was in charge of judging the crime list, and they named as their
winner Girl in Snow by Danya Kakafka. This is a murder mystery about a high school girl who
is murdered, and it's told from the perspective of three people left behind in this small town where
everyone knows each other, everyone is watching each other, and for some of these characters love
blurs with obsession. The Goldsmith's prize is for fiction that breaks the mould or extends the
possibilities of what a novel can look like. And in 2018 Robin Robertson took home that prize for
his book The Long Take, which was also shortlisted for the Booker prize, another amazing achievement.
The Long Take definitely plays with the form of the novel: it's written largely in verse
and really blurs the lines between poetry and prose. It's set in the US in the 1940s and 50s
and it's about a veteran who has PTSD and doesn't feel ready to go back to his home in Canada,
so he travels around the state, and we get lots of references to historical events and to films,
it's a very unique book. Another fun prize is the Authors Club Best First Novel award which
is given to the most promising debut published in Britain in the year leading up to the prize.
And in 1998 this was awarded to Trumpet by the poet Jackie Kay. This is a really wonderful,
very moving book about a fictional famous jazz musician called Joss Moody, who is revealed after
his death to have been a trans man, and the book explores the effect of this revelation on his son
who didn't know, and his wife who did know. And it's about the blurring
of his public and private selves. The Bailie Gifford prize is for the best in non-fiction,
the prize has as its motto "All the best stories are true." And in 2017 this prize was given to How
to Survive a Plague by David France which is the amazing history of the AIDS activists who
campaigned for better research and treatment and saved millions of lives. This book also won the
Green Carnation award for LGBTQ literature, and the Lamda Literary Award for LGBTQ non-fiction,
and includes lots of personal stories from people who were there and were part of this change.
OK next, the British Fantasy Awards, who give a prize every year for the best newcomer. And
in 2016 this prize was given to Zen Cho for her book Sorcerer to the Crown which is set
in alternative magical regency Britain. This book is about England's first African Sorcerer Royal,
whose job is now in danger, and an orphan called Prunella who has just discovered
England's most amazing magical discovery for centuries and intends to use it. The PENN
Hessel-Tiltman prize is awarded for non-fiction on historical subjects, and in 2017 it was given
to the book Black and British by David Olusoga, which is a really comprehensive history of Britain
all the way from Roman Britain up to present day, and tells the story of Black Britons who have
been erased from so much of the history we learn. Black British history, as David Olusoga explains,
is woven into so much of the cultural and economic history of our country that it
really does not make sense to teach history without it. A history without Black history
is incomplete. The next book I'm going to tell you about won lots of prizes, including the Arthur C
Clarke prize for best sci-fi and the Kitschies Red Tentacle which is given to a book that has
speculative or fantasy elements, and these awards often highlight very unusual progressive books.
So in the 2009-2010 awards season, both of those prizes went to the book The City & the
City by China Mieville, which is about a murder mystery investigation taking place in two cities
that occupy the same space simultaneously, so a very unusual premise. The Costa awards are one
of the UK's most popular prizes. These celebrate authors resident in the UK and Ireland. They have
five categories and then one book from one of those categories will be named as the overall
book of the year. In 2015 it was The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge, which had won the children's
book award, that also took home the overall book of the year prize. So this is a historical fantasy
set in Victorian England, it's about a young girl who's an aspiring scientist but growing up in a
world that won't take her seriously as a woman. And then she discovers this amazing magical tree
that feeds off lies. So that's where this dark fantasy element comes in. And then there's the
Audie awards. They're specifically for audiobooks. So they give out prizes for the best audiobooks in
different genres, the best narrators, the best audiobook production and marketing, and in 2019
the book that won the overall best audiobook of the year was Children of Blood and Bone by
Tomi Adeyemi. I've got the physical book here but I obviously really recommend the audiobook
so I will link to that in the description box below. The judges really praised the narrator
of this audiobook, they said that she did all the different voices perfectly, the pacing was
spot on, they described it as "world building achieved entirely through the spoken word",
so high praise. The British Book Awards, better known as the Nibbies, are really big within the
publishing industry because they give out prizes for publishers and bookshops as well as books.
They're all about recognising the different factors that go into a book's success. In
2014 it was known as the Specsavers National Book Awards, before being renamed back to the Nibbies,
but in 2014 the prize for Best Book of the Year, which a bit like the Costa awards is chosen from
one of the winners of other categories, and in this case is voted for by the public, was won
by The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, who had also won best new writer of the year. The Miniaturist
is historical fiction set in Amsterdam. It's about a rather lonely young newlywed who is
given a doll's house by her new husband that's an exact replica of their new home. And so she
hires a miniaturist to furnish the house, and this miniaturist has a very uncanny ability
to make her tiny little creations mirror their real life counterparts in very prophetic ways.
And then a somewhat controversial prize on BookTube is the Goodreads Choice awards.
This is voted for entirely by readers and so some people say that it's just the most
popular books that win every year, but there is no denying some amazing books have won this award.
For example in 2015 The Nightingale won the best historical fiction prize. The Nightingale is set
in France in 1939, when the Nazis invade, and it's about two sisters, one of whom has to keep making
these impossible choices to protect her life and her daughter's life, and the other sister joins
the rebellion. So we see these two women fighting for their freedom and survival in different ways.
And this book also won the audio awards in 2016 for best fiction audiobook. And there are just
so many other literary awards, so I'd love to know which ones you keep track of every year.
Do leave us a comment letting us know which prizes you get the most excited about, and I will link to
a playlist here of loads of our other literary fiction recommendations. See you next time!