Members of the American Booksellers Association have begun voting to determine winners in eight categories of the 2018 Indies Choice Book Awards and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards. (Finalists can be seen here.) Voting concludes May 2. Winners in nine categories will be announced May 9 in Bookselling This Week, and fêted along with the honor book recipients at ABA's Celebration of Bookselling and Author Awards Lunch on May 30 during BookExpo in New York City.
---
Congratulations to two very deserving winners: Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colo., and John Mesjak of Abraham Associates, named PW's Bookstore of the Year and Sales Representative of the Year, respectively.
The awards will be given at BookExpo in May.
---
Jay Bernard won the £5,000 (about $7,035) Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, which is funded by Carol Ann Duffy from her honorarium as poet laureate, for Surge: Side A.
Judge Sally Beamish commented: "An intensely personal relating of the New Cross massacre; powerful, lyrical and communicated with extraordinary intimacy. I was particularly struck by their drawing of a parallel between the struggle for validation in the black British community, and the poet's own clarification of identity by transforming their body through surgery. The performances are riveting and the poems are propelled by a strong internal momentum."