Nominations Open for Annual Connecticut Book Awards

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Read a good book lately?  Written by a Connecticut author or featuring a local illustrator?  You may want to urge that their work be submitted for a 2018 Connecticut Book Award.  The annual awards returned last year after a multi-year hiatus, to solid reviews.  The Connecticut Center for the Book (CCB) at Connecticut Humanities, which sponsors the awards, is now looking to build on that momentum.

The awards are designed to recognize and honor those authors and illustrators who have created the best books in or about the State of Connecticut, and celebrate the state’s rich history of authors and illustrators.

“There was such a wonderful selection of books submitted last year in each category that it was very hard to choose” said Lisa Comstock, director of the Connecticut Center for the Book. “We are confident that submissions this year will be exceptional as well.”

Eligibility requirements for the 2018 Awards include:

  • Authors and illustrators must currently reside in Connecticut and must have lived in the state at least three consecutive years or have been born in the state. Alternatively, the work may be substantially set in Connecticut.
  • Titles must have been published for the first time between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2017, or have a copyright within 2017.
  • All submitted books must have a valid ISBN.
  • Anthologies are acceptable. Author(s) must currently reside in Connecticut and must have lived in the state at least three consecutive years or have been born in the state. Alternatively, the works must be substantially set in Connecticut.
  • Books by deceased authors will be accepted only if the author was still living at the beginning of the eligibility year (January 1, 2017).

The deadline for submission for the 2018 Connecticut Book Awards is April 20, 2018. Finalists will be announced in September and winners announced in October. For more information, visit: http://ctcenterforthebook.org/submission-guidelines/.

Last year’s winners in each category include: Poetry: Fugitives by Danielle Pieratti; Lifetime Achievement for Literary Excellence to Gray Jacobik represented by The Banquet: New and Selected Poems; Young Readers: The Weight of Zero by Karen Fortunati; Nonfiction: Never Look an American in the Eye by Okey Ndibe; and in Fiction: Cajun Waltz by Robert H. Patton.  They followed in the footsteps of literary legends like Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wallace Stevens – and more recently, Connecticut-connected authors such as Annie Proulx, Suzanne Collins, Elizabeth Gilbert, Maurice Sendak and Luanne Rice.

Connecticut Humanities (CTH) is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities and administers the Connecticut Center for the Book.  Established by Congress in 1977 to “stimulate public interest in books and reading,” the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress is a national force for reading and literacy promotion.

Not eligible for the 2018 Connecticut Awards are reprints of books published in another year, eBooks, and books written by staff or families of Connecticut Center for the Book, Connecticut Humanities, or members or families of the CT Book Award review committee and/or its judges.