50 book award categories

Journeys, quests, and high-stakes action in a world governed by ordinary rules.

Collections of work by multiple contributors, fiction or nonfiction, gathered around a shared theme.

Short illustrated novels for readers moving beyond picture books, roughly ages five to eight.

Novels for readers roughly eight to twelve, with real plot, character, and consequence.

Books for the youngest readers, where text and illustration do different jobs and both must hold up to rereading.

Novels set in the present day, dealing with the world as it currently is.

Stories built around crime and its consequences, from the perspective of anyone caught in it.

Societies gone wrong, and the people who have to live inside them.

Stories shaped by faith and belief, welcome from any tradition.

Worlds with their own rules, and stories that hold themselves to those rules.

Narrative set in a period the author did not live through, where the past is a place rather than a backdrop.

Fiction built to unsettle, whether through dread, revulsion, or the slow arrival of something wrong.

Novels and stories centering LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, and experience.

Fiction where the writing itself carries as much weight as the story it tells.

Novels of conflict, service, and its aftermath.

A question at the centre and a reader invited to answer it before the book does.

Collections of poems, in any form and on any subject.

Stories with a central love story and an emotionally satisfying ending.

Extrapolation from what could be, whether near-future or far from here.

Collections of short fiction, by a single author or many.

Ghosts, hauntings, and the things that should not be there but are.

Momentum, escalating stakes, and a reader who cannot stop.

Novels centering women's lives, relationships, and interior experience.

Novels for readers roughly thirteen and up, written with teenage readers in mind rather than about them.

Someone else's life, researched and reconstructed.

Running, growing, and operating a business, written to be applied.

Books that teach children something specific, accurately, and make them want to keep going.

How we live together, and what that says about us.

Books read in pieces rather than through. Daily readings, reflections, prayers, and meditations.

Teaching, learning, and scholarly work written for students, educators, or researchers.

Starting something and carrying the risk of it.

Theology, doctrine, practice, and religious history, welcome from any tradition.

Personal finance, investing, debt, and the behaviour behind all three.

Books written for the reader who is grieving, rather than about the author who grieved.

Physical and mental health, written for the person living with it.

The past, researched and told, from any period and any part of the world.

Encouragement and hope, offered so that something remains after the reading.

Directing and developing other people.

Memoir, history, and analysis centering LGBTQ+ lives and experience.

A piece of your own life, shaped so a stranger can find something of themselves in it. Includes autobiography.

Service, conflict, and coming home. Memoir, history, and analysis alike.

Raising children, at any stage and in any circumstance.

How the mind works, written for understanding rather than for change.

Addiction, recovery, and the long work that follows.

Love, marriage, family, communication, and connection.

Science, nature, and technology, written for a general reader.

A method the reader can apply, specific enough that two readers would do the same thing.

Inner life and meaning, not bound to a single tradition.

Athletes, teams, competition, and what sport reveals about the people in it.

Real crimes, investigated and told with care for everyone involved.