Quill Awards Announce Nominees, Celebrity Hosts

On Thursday, August 4, the five nominees in each of the 19 categories for the first Quill Awards were announced by Reed Business Information (RBI) and the NBC Universal Television Stations. The nominees for the awards, which were created to honor excellence in book publishing, were selected by the Quills Nominating Board, comprised of approximately 6,000 librarians and booksellers, including booksellers with Book Sense. (For the complete list, go to news.bookweb.org/read/3708.) Voting to select the inaugural Quill Awards winners will be open to the public online at www.QuillsVote.com, between August 15 - September 15.

The winners will be announced on October 11 at a ceremony hosted by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. Special appearances by Jon Stewart, Robert Klein, and other celebrities are also scheduled as part of the festivities. A one-hour Quill Awards television special, hosted by Al Roker and WNBC's Jane Hanson, will be carried on the 14 NBC Universal Owned and Operated Television Stations on Saturday, October 22, 2005.

To help booksellers promote the Quill Awards, the Quills Literacy Foundation has created signage, which is available as a downloadable PDF. In addition, the Quills is making a limited number of consumer brochures available to stores via the August Book Sense White Box. Booksellers who would like to distribute the brochure, but don't receive them in the White Box, should contact the Quills' Anne Binkeley at [email protected].

Among the list of finalists for the awards are most of the 2005 Book Sense Book of the Year (BSBY) winners and Honor Books. They include Book Sense Book of the Year winner for Fiction Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury) in the Quills' Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror category and BSBY Fiction Honor Books The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin) and The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd (Viking) in the Quills Fiction category. Two Book Sense Book of the Year 2005 Honor Books for Adult Nonfiction are nominated: Magical Thinking: True Stories by Augusten Burroughs (St.Martin's) and The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker edited by Robert Mankoff (Black Dog & Leventhal) as are Children's Literature Honor Books Ida B...and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World by Katherine Hannigan (Greenwillow) and Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson (Disney). A BSBY Children's Illustrated Honor Book, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale by Mo Willems (Hyperion), is also one of the final nominees for the Quill Awards.