The winners of the 2011 Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Awards, all for books written by authors living in the region, include four honorable mentions for books that had strong second place finishes:
Fiction: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li (Random House)
Nonfiction: Packing for Mars by Mary Roach (Norton)
Nonfiction honorable mention: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 (University of California)
Poetry: Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon)
Food Writing: My Calabria by Rosetta Costantino with Janet Fletcher (Norton)
Children's Picture Book: The Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Children's Picture Book honorable mention: Zero by Kathryn Otoshi (KO Kids Books)
Teen Lit: The Sky Is Forever by Jandy Nelson (Dial)
Teen Lit honorable mention: The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney (Little Brown Books for Young Readers)
Regional Title: Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit (University of California)
Regional Title honorable mention: State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California by Laura Cunningham (Heyday)
---
The international and Canadian shortlists for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced. Judges Tim Lilburn, Colm Toíbín and Chase Twichell read 450 collections, including 20 translations, by poets in 37 countries to narrow their selections to seven finalists, who will be awarded $10,000 each. The winners of the $65,000 international and Canadian Griffin Poetry prizes will be named June 1.
International shortlist
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney (FSG)
Adonis: Selected Poems by Adonis, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa (Yale University Press)
The Book of the Snow by François Jacqmin, translated from the French by Philip Mosley (Arc Publications)
Heavenly Questions by Gjertrud Schnackenberg (FSG)
Canadian shortlist
Ossuaries by Dionne Brand (McClelland & Stewart)
The Irrationalist by Suzanne Buffam (House of Anansi Press)
Lookout by John Steffler (McClelland & Stewart)