Pan Macmillan celebrates British Book Awards success
Pan Macmillan took home four trophies at this year’s British Book Awards.
Pan Macmillan took home four trophies at this year’s British Book Awards, hosted at Grosvenor House on 12 May. Percival Everett was named Author of the Year, with ‘the past 12 months cementing his position as one of the great literary novelists of our time’. The judges observed that James would ‘endure as a testament to the power of language, freedom and familial love’.
Everett also won Fiction Book of the Year for James. In a hotly contested category, his reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn triumphed over competition from Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, David Nicholls’s You Are Here and Jacqueline Wilson’s Think Again. Nibbies judges called James a ‘future classic’, a ‘gripping, stunning’ and ‘beautifully executed’ story. When crowning James the winner, the panel of judges agreed that the story delivers ‘the message the world needs right now’.
Sociopath by Patric Gagne (Bluebird) was named for Audiobook of the Year: Non-Fiction. ‘It felt like a friend telling me their extraordinary life story,’ said one judge. Speaking in a video acceptance the author said: ‘It’s incredible that so many people in the UK have taken my book into their hearts and helped elevate the conversation around sociopathy’.
Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back by Isabella Tree and Angela Harding won Children’s Book of the Year: Non-Fiction. ‘This will stand the test of time,’ pronounced one judge. In a video acceptance, where she thanked Illustrator Angela Harding and Associate Publisher Gaby Morgan, Isabella Tree said: ‘Thank you to the British Book Awards for recognising what I hope this book represents, which is a story of hope.’
Pan author Kate Mosse was awarded the British Book Award for Social Impact in Celebration of Allen Lane in recognition of her work on the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Helen Tamblyn-Saville’s Wonderland Bookshop won the Macmillan Children’s Books sponsored Children’s Bookseller of the Year. Wonderland was chosen for its work collaborating with dozens of schools, providing books to under-privileged students in a pay it forward scheme.
Other highlights included Rob Biddulph being named Illustrator of the Year and Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler winning Children’s Book of the Year for Jonty Gentoo: The Adventures of a Penguin, published with Alison Green Books.
‘The 35th year of these fabulous awards was the best yet, combining politics with pluralism, grit with hope, joy with defiance. Our winners – among them Percival Everett, Kate Mosse, Rob Biddulph, Julia Donaldson, Waterstones and Bloomsbury – speak to the great strengths of this trade. Excellence. Fortitude. Imagination. Defiance. Longevity. Ingenuity. This is a business that stands for reading and its value to society, and for three decades now The British Book Awards has stood with it. The challenges we face – from artificial intelligence to authoritarianism – are growing, but we are many, and we will not be moved from this purpose.’
Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller and chair of The British Book Awards
