February PrizeCAT--A Prize from Your Own Country

This month's category is A Prize from Your Own Country. The prize may be awarded specifically to books that are published in your country or authored by a resident of your country, or it may be that the prize-giving organization is based in your country. The possibilities should be extensive. To help you start thinking about some ideas, I've listed a few random prizes for countries that I know some of us are from. My apologies if I didn't include your country.

Australia
Miles Franklin Award
Ned Kelly Awards
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards

Canada
Governor General's Literary Awards
Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards
Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour

Germany
Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis
German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis)
Kurd Laßwitz Award

UK
Duff Cooper Prize
Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation
Women's Prize for Fiction

USA
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
O. Henry Awards
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Let us know what you decide to read. And don't forget, the wiki awaits your reading choices.

I'll be reading something from the Ontario Library Association's Evergreen award nominees, probably Superfan or Silver Nitrate.

My first thought for Canada was Giller Prize. Tempted to check out some other options, as well, but assuming I stick with the Giller, I will likely read:
What Strange Paradise / Omar El Akkad

I'm planning on two. An Unexpected Companion won the Australian Romance Novelists Ruby Award for Historical Romance in 2021, and The Good Sister, which I own, won a Sisters in Crime Davitt Award.

I've had The Great Man by Kate Christensen on my shelves for many years so this is a good reason to finally pick it up. It won the Pen Faulkner Award in 2008.

I have Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens currently borrowed from the library - winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.

If the library deities continue to smile upon me, I’m almost certainly going to read The Book of Goose, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (for American residents) in 2023.

I will probably read The Second Coming by Walker Percy. This book was one of the four runners-up for the PEN/Faulker Award in 1981.

I have a couple lined up for February, and I really hope I'll be able to get both of them read. The Girls of Atomic City won the Merze Tate - Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award from the American Political Science Association. It came home from work with me today. I also want to read Mrs. Adams in Winter, which was a Pulitzer finalist.

I'm going for a National Book Award Winner, The Words That Remain, translated by a friend of mine, which will also get my "Books in Translation" category for another challenge I'm working on

I'll be reading The Orenda by Joseph Bowden for this category. A friend gave me this book a few years ago and I'm sorry to say it has taken me so long to read it. It won several Canadian prizes.

>11 VivienneR: I loved that book when I read it a few years ago. It was a rare 5 star read for me.

>12 cbl_tn: Glad to hear that, Carrie! My friend said the same.

My (very much tentative) plan is to read The Left-handed booksellers of London (winner of the 2021 Best Novel Ditmar)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler has been on my bookshelf unread for way too long. It was the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2014, and also counts for the AlphaKIT.

I'm hoping to read The Inverted World by Christopher Priest, 1974 winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award

When I was looking through the links for this challenge, I saw that two books I've already read won the Los Angeles Times awards: Love Thy Neighbor by Peter Maass (about the seige and wartime atrocities in Sarajevo) and The Big Short by Michael Lewis (very readable, and made into a movie a while ago). I highly recommend both books.

I read The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
No doubt, this book is a fabulous achievement by Boyden but it was a difficult read considering the legacy of the Catholic church in Canada of all those recently discovered unmarked graves at schools operated by the church.

After a couple of false starts with An Unexpected Companion (too much waffle) and The Good Sister (the bad sister commits a crime early on and I don't want anything more to do with her), I've finished Love and Virtue by Diana Reid. It won a lot of Australian prizes and was shortlisted for more.

Winner of the ABIA Book of the Year Award
Winner of the ABIA Award for Literary Fiction of the Year
Winner ABA Booksellers Choice Award for Fiction
Winner of the MUD Literary Prize
Shortlisted for The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year for Fiction
Shortlisted Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction
Shortlisted ABIA Matt Richell Award New Writer of the Year

I read The Woman They Could Not Silence which won the Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (2021)

I decided to go extra local and pick a book that had won a prize from my own state: Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, which won the Washington State Book Award last year for creative nonfiction/memoir.

I read a Newberry Medal winner The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden.

Finished We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2014. Just started it Friday night and had to finish it!

Giller Prize - Canada

What Strange Paradise / Omar El Akkad
4 stars

Amir is a 9-year old Syrian boy who survives a shipwreck. Everyone else to be seen has washed up on shore, dead. He is on an island, but doesn’t know where he is, nor does he understand the language. When two men see him and point and shout, Amir gets scared and runs. He runs into Vanna, 15-years old and though they are unable to communicate verbally, she hides him.

The story then shifts to “Before”, which brings us up to date on how Amir got where he is. We go back and forth between Amir’s before and “After”. Much of after is told from Vanna’s POV, but occasionally we switch to the POV of a colonial who is dead set on finding Amir, the little boy who ran away.

Given that it’s (primarily) from a 9-year old’s POV, it took a bit to figure out what was going on through much of the story. I am still not sure I understand the ending. But it was a “good” (powerful) story, even so.

I just finished The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2023. My feelings about it are complicated, but it’s definitely a five-star book for me.

Katzenberge has won three German prizes: the Mara-Cassens-Prize for a debut novel, the Anna-Seghers-Prize and the Nicolas-Born-Förderpreis. A very interesting book about the complicated family ties in post-WWII Poland.

I read The Girls of Atomic City, which won the Merze Tate - Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award from the American Political Science Association. As a Knoxville native, I'm very familiar with Oak Ridge and visited it regularly on school field trips. There is also a very good community theater there that I would visit occasionally. I've always been curious to learn more about it's secret history, and this book didn't disappoint!

I've read The All of It by Jeannette Haien which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction in 1987 and is also on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die List.

ETA: I meant to mention that she was 65 when this was published.

I finished The Thirteenth Tale yesterday and found that it won a few American awards, including the Alex Award, given to books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.

I just read one of this year's Caldecott Award winners, Big by Vashti Harrison, which features a young black girl who was happy when she was small but is bullied when she gets big. It is based on the author's personal experience.

I finished The Changing Outer Hebrides by Frank Rennie, which won the Highland Book Prize in 2020.

It took me a while to complete this challenge but I finally finished Reuniting with Strangers by Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio. This was on the 2024 Canada Reads longlist and is a collection of interconnected short stories about Filipino families in Canada and the difficulties of reuniting after a long separation.