Barnes & Noble Announces the Finalists for the Annual Discover Great New Writers Awards; Winners to be Announced March 1st

Business Wire, Feb 1, 2006

NEW YORK -- Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largest bookseller, today announced the finalists for its prestigious 2005 Discover Great New Writers Awards. The winners in each category, fiction and nonfiction, receive a $10,000 prize and a full year of additional promotion from Barnes & Noble. Second-place finalists receive $5,000, and third-place finalists, $2,500. The finalists are:

Fiction
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Kitty Fitzgerald, Pigtopia (Miramax Books)
Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins)
Catherine Tudish, Tenney's Landing (Scribner)

Nonfiction
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Louise Brown, The Dancing Girls of Lahore (4th Estate)
Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away (Houghton Mifflin)
Martin Moran, The Tricky Part (Beacon Press)

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, March 1st, at a private awards ceremony. At 7:00 p.m. that evening, all six finalists are invited to read from their work at Barnes & Noble's Lincoln Triangle store in New York City, located at 1972 Broadway (at 66th Street). The Discover Awards honor the best works featured in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program during the previous calendar year.

The Finalists

Irish poet Kitty Fitzgerald's remarkable novel, Pigtopia, is an ambitious and inventive tale of a growing friendship between a misunderstood teenage girl and a social outcast with a porcine predilection. An unnamed West African country serves as the backdrop for Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala's hair-raising novel of survival, narrated by a young boy conscripted into a ragtag guerilla army. And Catherine Tudish's Tenney's Landing is a timeless collection of the subtly intertwined stories of the inhabitants of a Pennsylvania river town.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore is British sociologist Louise Brown's haunting foray into the lives of the women who ply an ancient trade in modern-day Pakistan, and a fascinating cultural history. From the training fields of Quantico, Virginia, to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, Nathaniel Fick's One Bullet Away, an inspirational account of his service as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, stands out for its honesty, intelligence and introspection. Actor/playwright Martin Moran's exquisitely written memoir, The Tricky Part, startles and provokes with the questions it raises about the consequences of sexual abuse, and the possibility of forgiveness.

The Jurists

Two panels of distinguished literary jurists selected the finalists and will select the winners. Serving as this year's fiction jurists are Carrie Brown, whose first novel, Rose's Garden, won the Discover Award in 1998; Howard Frank Mosher, renown for his novels set in northern Vermont; and Samrat Upadyay, whose just recently published short-story collection, The Royal Ghosts, falls on the heels of his first novel, The Guru of Love.

This year's nonfiction judges include three memoirists: Debra Dickerson, the author of An American Story and The End of Blackness; James Frey, the bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard; and Tom Groneberg, the author of The Secret Life of Cowboys and a forthcoming work, One Good Horse.

The Discover Awards

The Discover Great New Writers program 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 70 new and previously underappreciated writers. Submissions to the program are read and discussed by a volunteer group of Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection for the program's seasonal promotions. Past winners of the annual Discover Great New Writers Award include John Dalton for Heaven Lake (2004), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals (2004), Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003), Anthony Doerr for The Shell Collector (2002), Manil Suri for The Death of Vishnu (2001), Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers (2001), Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), Chang-Rae Lee for Native Speaker (1995), and David Guterson for Snow Falling on Cedars (1994).

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 824 bookstores in 50 states. For the fourth year in a row, the company is the nation's top retail brand for quality, according to the EquiTrend(R) Brand Study by Harris Interactive(R). Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web's largest e-commerce sites and the number one online bookseller for quality among e-commerce companies, according to the latest EquiTrend survey.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained via the Internet by visiting the company's corporate Web site: http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com.