On Independence Day, winners were unveiled for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 2017 Southern Book Prize (formerly the SIBA Book Award). This year features an expanded list of categories, inspired by the tastes and inclinations of Southern readers. Nominated by booksellers and their customers, vetted by bookstores and selected by a jury of Southern booksellers, these are the books Southern bookstores were most passionate about, and inspired the most "you've got to read this" and "handsell" moments, SIBA noted. The 2017 Southern Book Prize winners are:
Fiction
Coming of age: Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (Harper)
Family life: A Lowcountry Christmas by Mary Alice Monroe (Gallery Books)
Historical: Chasing the North Star by Robert Morgan (Algonquin)
Literary: Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks (Hub City Press)
Mystery & detective: The Kept Woman by Karin Slaughter (Morrow)
Southern stories & stories by Southerners: The Whole Town's Talking by Fannie Flagg (Random House)
Thriller: Redemption Road by John Hart (Thomas Dunne Books)
Juvenile: Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart (Delacorte Press)
Nonfiction
Biography, autobiography & memoir: The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham (Milkweed)
Cooking: Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South by Vivian Howard (Little Brown and Company)
Creative Nonfiction: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family & Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance (Harper)
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The short story "The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away" by Bushra al-Fadil of Sudan has won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Al-Fadil receives £7,000 (about $9,040) and translator Max Shmookler receives £3,000 (about $3,875).
Chair of judges Nii Ayikwei Parkes said that the story "explores through metaphor and an altered, inventive mode of perception--including, for the first time in the Caine Prize, illustration--the allure of, and relentless threats to freedom. Rooted in a mix of classical traditions as well as the vernacular contexts of its location, Bushra al-Fadil's 'The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away' is at once a very modern exploration of how assaulted from all sides and unsupported by those we would turn to for solace we can became mentally exiled in our own lands, edging in to a fantasy existence where we seek to cling to a sort of freedom until ultimately we slip into physical exile." The story was first published in The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction, published last year in the U.K. by Comma Press.
Bushra al-Fadil, who holds a Ph.D. in Russian language and literature, is a Sudanese writer living in Saudi Arabia. His most recent collection, Above a City's Sky, was published in 2012.