Borders Group, Inc., recently announced the nominees for the 2007 Original Voices Awards, which honor "fresh, compelling and ambitious works from new and emerging talents" in fiction and nonfiction. Awards are also given for young adult literature and children’s picture books. Borders employees selected the finalists in each category.
The nominees for the 12th annual award in fiction are Brock Clarke for his novel An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin); Steven Hall for his novel The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate); Sheridan Hay for her novel The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday); Miranda July for her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner); Patrick Rothfuss for his novel The Name of the Wind (Penguin); and Aoibheann Sweeney for her novel Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking (Penguin).
The nominees in nonfiction are Ishmael Beah for A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Kate Braestrup for Here If You Need Me: A True Story (Little, Brown); Lucinda Franks for My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir (Miramax); Peter Godwin for When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa (Little, Brown); Marina Nemat for Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir (Free Press); and Amy Silverstein for Sick Girl (Grove/Atlantic).
The winners, chosen by Borders corporate staff, will be announced in January 2008. Each author will receive a prize of $5,000, and the winning books will be featured in Borders stores nationwide.
